Vatican City

For an adult Catholic, the experience of seeing the Square of St. Peter's for the first time is wholly unlike any other. First you see the large pillars that seem to promise no more than any of a thousand other Roman or Grecian collonades, but the moment you pass through them you see the enormous obelisk pointing in its grasping, pagan way to the same God to which the great Dome and Spire point with unparalleled eloquence; the saints around the square welcome you with the same unflagging vigilance and joy with which they have welcomed untold hosts of pilgrims before you, who have likewise come to pay their own meager but eternal respects to the physical heart of the body of Christ. The feeling is not quite that of seeing something for the first time, for you cannot escape the impression that your are merely seeing the full face of something that has narrowly escaped your vision these many years, something that has always been present just outside your field of vision. A lifetime of near-misses, of being barely unable to turn your head fast enough to catch sight of a great and mystifying Presence is in one swift moment fulfilled; I do not think it is too much to say that the moment is a dim foreshadowing of that great eternal Moment when we shall awake and see the true face of the King of Kings, recognizing at once that we knew it all along and that we have never known it.
These notes I record now I scribbled first to the flickering light of a cigarette coal on the balcony of the conventual room where I am staying, from which the illuminated dome of St. Peter's is all that will let itself be seen. Night owls across the way fill the warm air with the sounds of a James Bond movie that spill generously into the sky from their open window. I do not begrudge the sound, nor the dim light with which I am struggling, for in them I find something beautiful about the nature of the Church herself, for now I am merely seeing a directly physical expression of what has always been true. Over how many of my cigarettes has the specter of St. Peter's loomed? Over how many action movies casting nets of simple joy into the unflinching night? Over how many quiet evenings beguiled into sleep by fleeting glimpses of beauties beyond my ken?
The bells ring in St. Peter's to usher in the eleven o'clock hour, unsettling the quiet with their undeniable thrumming. I look at St. Peter's and, hearing the bells, I realize that for all the sins of its past occupants, the Body of Christ still throbs within it. The throbbing of St. Peter's great heart awakens vibrations in my soul as well, and I feel anew the Body of Christ that some meager hours ago the priest laid on my tongue. From the depth of my sin comes the thrumming and the throbbing of Christ, creating earthy and ethereal harmonies with the bells that ring out to the night over St. Peter's. The clappers of the bells seem to have lost the power to strike, gaining instead the power to pour out rivers of pure sound unbroken by violence: the sound is that of blood streaming from a wound.