Glasgow Churches

Editor's note: I left my camera card my computer because I was catching up on Paris posts and so I didn't take any pictures. Sorry. 
Editor's secondary note: I can't claim to have come up with some of my comments on the use of spaces in church architecture that come later in the post. I'd love to talk it over with you, citing heavily from Richard Kieckhefer's Theology in Stone.
Editor's final note: This is a long post. I'm sorry again. 

So the last time I came to Scotland I came with my youth choir. It's quite different when you're traveling in a large group- the potential for getting the wrong train or bus isn't as great, as you've got a coach to travel in, your meals are much more determined and you have a ready-made group of friends. It's very different from showing up at the train station and hoping your hostel is close enough to walk and sociable enough to make friends.

The wonderful thing about having been in a place already, though, is the potential of friends to meet you. My choir director from back home is friends with a Scottish Methodist pastor who has a circuit of four churches just outside of Glasgow and after a couple of emails, Liz and her husband met me outside my hostel on Sunday morning for a day of exploring the Methodist churches around Glasgow.

Now, I grew up in the Bible Belt of the United States. We had FCA in high school and most people had a youth group of some kind that they went to on Sundays or Wednesdays or the occasional Thursdays. I pretty much lived at my church in high school and it was a big change in college when I only had Sunday School, a small group and bell choir to go to. I'm used to a regular congregation of 200 or more filling the room I'm in on a Sunday morning and there's nothing unusual to me about not knowing every member of the congregation. In short, I'm used to big spaces and lots of people on a Sunday morning.

The church in Scotland isn't particularly like that. Across Europe I've been to several services in large cathedrals with full crowds, but on the whole, the services have been made of smaller congregations. Christianity is on the decline in the Western world and there's not really any getting around that. With that in mind, getting up to read the two lessons on a Sunday morning in front of less than twenty members of the congregation wasn't surprising, especially after having been warned. We were in a small sanctuary upstairs in the church, looking for all the world like a small village church placed on top of a meeting hall.

This is the thing that I've been missing most when visiting big churches- none of them seem to have fellowship halls or a church office in another building or rehearsal spaces around back or anything like that. My church campus back home has four or five buildings depending on how you count- there's the sanctuary and the attached children's building, the church office and education building, the youth building and the Family Life Center (fellowship hall). It's the meetings that occur, either on Sunday mornings for Sunday school or during the week for any number of small groups, committees, organizations or rehearsals that form the life of the church. The ceremony on Sunday is the knot that ties all the strings of our different focuses together.

So I climbed a set of stairs following behind the greeter at the church door and walked into the sanctuary, noting the layout of the church- three sections of fixed pews plus a balcony all facing the altar on a raised platform in the center front of the church, accompanied by a pulpit just off on stage left, a piano on stage right and a nice set of stairs up to the organ that dominated the wall behind the altar. In a cathedral, you're likely to see a huge altar piece behind the main altar after walking through the choir. It was a comfort to see an organ back there, almost marking the Wesley brothers' musical emphasis.

Liz had told the people we greeted just outside the sanctuary that I was here visiting and studying worship spaces and how they're used in liturgy. This has indeed been a focus of mine but not something I've talked about very much at all here. Let me explain.

The majority of the places I've seen have been longitudinal ceremonial churches- they're laid out either in a hall or in a cross and the focus of the church is the altar. The liturgical focus is communion- sermons have grown important over the years, but we're as expected or central as we see them today until the Middle Ages leading into the Renaissance. Mass is pretty much the same everywhere beginning with a procession Bible bearers, acolytes, crucifers and priests who all need to bring the holy accoutrements of a service into the prepared space. The congregation sits and watches and comes forward for communion at the end. All of the rest of the side altars, chapels and decorations, unless they're used in the procession, are there for devotional use. There hasn't been much need to talk over this use of the space- it's the same, with variations over time, that's been in place since Christians began using basilicas in Constantine;s time.

This church was arranged the same way, though without the side altars. Another difference is that the action of the service happened at the pulpit as opposed to the altar- Liz led prayers and started off hymns and preached from the pulpit. We didn't even have communion. Much of the time, a protestant service is going to be focused on the pulpit and the sermon. Even though we occupy ceremonial churches, we've adapted them to put a focus on the things we feel are important. Some honor tradition more than others but most reflect the changes that came about a couple hundred years ago.

But that's just the inside layout of the church. Most longitudinal churches are going to be on the ground floor of a building, because the space is so well suited for processions into the building. A few ceremonial steps up to the entrance to the sanctuary aren't that big of a deal, but the winding stair in this church sets the sanctuary apart from the more easily accessible fellowship hall. The sanctuary is an upper room now, and you go there purposefully, no chance of wandering in off the street and finding it. It's a different emphasis, an interesting combination of ceremony and fellowship that also presents challenges in accessibility. It makes you want to read into the history of the church and see the thought behind the design even as you sit through a Sunday in the life of the living church.

I loved reading the lessons and singing hymns and listening again to a service in my language with a sermon I could understand and think through. We're such people of words, we protestants. It's the lyrics that make our songs holy, not the tunes in particular. Liz had picked the hymn words but let the organist pick the tunes. After the service, the organist came over to chat and offered me an old red hymnal. Not to brag, but I've been told by multiple other people that Methodists have the best hymnal and, as a church choir mouse, I've loved my fair share of hymnals over time. I was surprised at the gift and I kept asking, "To have? I can keep it?" and Liz said, "It's funny the things she gets excited about," with a laugh.

A favorite pastime of mine is exploring churches. Given the connections to facilitate the opportunity, I would love to spend days wandering in and out of the maze of back halls I'm sure cathedrals have. Maybe I'll write a book and then I can go like Victor Hugo and familiarize myself with the twists and turns of the stairs of Notre Dame. Given the opportunity here, just outside of Glasgow, we found our way into the old sacristy down a back stair that led from the sanctuary to a hallway that led eventually to the fellowship hall. A small room at the back of the sanctuary served as the sacristy now and this room lay forgotten. On wall, though, was a framed letter from John Wesley himself. See, I'm a nerd. This means I'm given free reign to be utterly excited about subjects that might confuse other people. A letter from the founder of my favorite branch of Christianity? I love history.

We left Port Glasgow and headed over to Paisley, home of the fabric pattern. The streets are all named after things in the textiles industry- there's a Gauze Street and a Silk Street, etc. You figure I'd feel at home, growing up across the street from a clothing factory. There's an abbey in Paisley and the largest Baptist church in Europe, I believe. It's interesting to think about the heydey of the town and the kinds of churches built then- how exactly do the stars align to set prosperous times in Paisley with a rise in the Baptist interpretation of the faith?

But we came to Paisley to look at the Methodist hall that houses a congregation of 80, a fair sized congregation. The place looks like a theater from the street, a large building on a street corner without a peaked roof or steeple to mark it from the shops around it. The gated front door even reminded me a bit of a box office, though no ticket windows peered out from the walls. The morning's service, held in the fellowship hall on the first floor, had ended but a few people had come in to see the hall. We walked upstairs and I felt in my element again- after two months, give or take a week, of walking into churches with the express purpose of looking around, I was quite used to touring sacred spaces.

The Methodist Hall in Paisley is quite different from the other churches I've primarily studied, but not so different from the churches I've found myself worshiping in over the years. Instead of following in the traditions of Roman basilicas shaped into crosses that had formed church architecture for the longest time, designed for ceremonies and sacraments, the Methodist Hall is an auditorium, built for the speaking and hearing of sermons. The downstairs is full of theater seats facing a raised stage comprising of two side stages and a central platform jutting out just a bit with indentations. The pulpit used to stand there, when the hall was in use, again just in front of the organ console and pipes that dominated the wall behind it. A communion table could be brought out as well and probably placed on the lower level, underneath the pulpit. Upstairs the rest of the organ sat opposite the pulpit, surrounded by a balcony full of the same seats as below.

In a day and age of megachurches in America and huge Christian conferences meeting in arenas in Atlanta, it doesn't seem odd to me that people would choose to worship in a space like this. There's great acoustics and a choir could have a killer show in a place like this. Man, bring a gospel choir over here- it's a near perfect venue for that. There are these back stairs that lead from the chancel's upper levels to a little backstage place where the choir could get ready before walking in. I've missed choir lofts. But this place is designed for a performance. It's liturgically planned for the congregation to come in and sit and watch. The fellowship hall downstairs is planned for participation.

That's not to say that it has to be used like that. Yes, it's ideal for lectures and concerts- it would be a great space for a conference on any topic. There's not even a ton of religious symbolism in the room- the walls are white and the skylights have cherubs on them, but that's all. And churches today, everyone's so creative. A person with a good eye for the stage could really use this space- there's a lot of potential there. I mean, there are all sorts of considerations to take into effect when you've got a space like this- I've often wondered how much it costs to heat a cathedral (because goodness knows they're always cold unless you're in Spain), and, again, with the flight of stairs to contend with, there's a bit of an inconvenience in accessing the space, but there's always inconvenience when you're doing some spectacular.

And that's what was happening with big venues like this were built. Spectacular things. But all across Europe, Christian is a thing that people have been. And you can hear stories of spectacular things happening in, say, South America or Asia or Africa, but the places from which we've been sending missionaries, they're mostly over this whole church thing. And it's going to take quite a bit of work to convince them different. I mean, there's a thousand different ways to do the work, the future being oddly similar to the cavernous building in Paisley. It's difficult to know your way around, but the entire space, it's full of potential, you know?

St. Paul's Outside the Walls

So there's four big churches in Rome you're supposed to see. There's St. Peter's Basilica, clearly,  San Giovanni in Laterano, the actual cathedral of Rome, Santa Maria Maggiorie, the biggest of the churches devoted to St. Mary in Rome, and finally, Basilica Papale di San Paolo fuori le Mura, or, as most of us will call it, St. Paul's Outside the Walls.

St. Paul's...

And the walls it is outside

Now St. Peter's is actually in Vatican City, so it's not technically in Rome, I guess. San Giovanni in Laterano is down the way from Santa Maria Maggiorie, 'cause I walked there, following the pope (details to come), but both of them are maybe fifteen minutes from the Colosseum, which is pretty distant from the Vatican. Walkable, but distant. St. POtW, as I will now call it, due to sheer sloth, is like, the next to last metro stop on that line or something ridiculous. It's not outside of Rome, but it is outside the walls built by Aurelius and the dude who came after him, and was damaged when the Sarcens (Arabs) invaded Rome in the 9th century. Thank you, wikipedia. Also, thank you to Hank Green for amusing me on my planned recovery days and teaching me the correct pronunciation of wikipedia at 1:40. (Though not the correct spelling of communication. One year of that.) The point of all that discussion is to show you that it takes a little bit of effort to hop around to these places. Rome is full of churches and I didn't get to see all of them by any stretch of the imagination. Good thing I chucked coins in the Trevi Fountain like no one's business.

I got to take a great picture of the hall, as there was no one around. It's too far, I guess. Sorry this picture has nothing to do with the Trevi Fountain.

St. POtW is a basilica like St. Peter's and like St. Peter's, it holds the remains of an important apostle. Down the stairs between the papal altar and the hall of the basilica you can see the tomb of St. Paul, along with chains that held him at some point in his ministry, which was a wow moment for me. I mean, Paul was the apostle to the gentiles and his letters make up a sizable portion of the New Testament, correctly attributed and otherwise. So even though St. Paul's has an astounding hall like St. Peter's and a large papal altar like St. Peter's, the thing that impressed me the most had to be seen kneeling in front of a tiny square or light.

Here, before I ramble, let me show you a picture I found really funny and then you can close out the post, because the rest of it is just a rambling story. It's a difficult habit to break.

Here's Jesus, with Peter and Paul beside him...

And a really freaky old man beetle getting ready to bite his oddly shaped big toe!

I have this terrible tendency to wander into churches right before a mass happens. I mean, maybe it's not a terrible tendency, and part of it is that I'll do the dome climb for places at the last minute, which means I'm near the top during mass, but beyond that, I just end up in a church at the right (?) time. (I was going to say wrong, but it doesn't do to call the time for mass wrong.) But this time, it was not my fault, as a special mass had been called. Now, I always kinda internally giggled when churches had signs saying that you could schedule your own mass as long as you brought your own priest. It gave me this mental image of someone pulling a priest out of a suitcase saying something like, "Thanks goodness we didn't forget the priest!"

It makes a lot more sense when it's, say, an American Catholic youth group going on a pilgrimage. I sat down in some chairs away from the benches in front of the main altar when I saw people starting to gather since I hadn't looked around all I wanted to and I always like sitting through mass, despite the obvious and frequent language barriers. I was surprised and relieved when the head priest started talking in English and sat through a pretty pleasant service. It was good to actually understand a sermon for once.


Well, I say 'understand.' They were celebrating St. Paul's mass (that could be a total lie, Catholic friends- I'm just going off of what I remember the guy saying) which made sense, since, you know, St. Paul was right there, but the sermon surprised me. He talked a lot about believing in the church, which I'm all for. I support faith in an organization that has great potential to bring good and wonderful things into the world at the base level, and I believe that the Church can be a balm to the world around us, providing inspiration and courage. So I am all for believing in the church, regardless of denomination or creed. But then he said that the church had always been and will always be a source of complete truth for anything you'll ever need.

And I, being terrible at hiding my emotions, sat up and gave the preaching priest a look that I don't think I've sent anyone since an evangelical Christian had the audacity to condemn all scientists in my hearing, in front of a group of trusting children without access to auxiliary views. I feel like I need to bring the increduosity for other people. Yes, I think that the church is a great source of truth in the world. But I don't know that you can trust any human organization as purely as he was implying. And I hate to bring up a resolved example, but in his own time, Galileo was subjected to the church's error. The church can be wrong. All churches can be wrong, and have been wrong. I didn't think people advocated for an infallible organization anymore.

I mean, it's good for youth today to hear a vote of confidence for the church. And the rest of it rang out like a normal youth group sermon, with a wonderful fresh outlook for me on the good of a pilgrimage, though with the ever irksome insistence on girls guarding their affection and boys guarding their eyes. After the mass was over, I took pictures of side altars and headed out of the church, snapping more photos of giant statues and the facade. A service in English made me think again about how much I depend on words to make a service worthwhile for me. It also made me think about how much I analyze every word thrown my way.

Then again, I also analyze every word of Paul's thrown my way as well. Makes me wish I had a better way of thanking him than picking apart goodhearted texts.

St. Peter's Basilica

Editor's Note: You're stuck with some unfortunate reflections of a personal nature in addition to the expected expounding of history and ideas. Feel free to disagree and correct as needed. Much thanks.

An indulgence is a pardon from time in purgatory, time which is required by God's justice, even though the guilt of the sin is forgiven by God's grace. Indulgences are given by the pope or by bishops or others given authority by the pope, who gets his authority as the successor of St. Peter, to whom Christ gave the keys to the kingdom and the power to bind things on earth that will be bound in heaven. They're given with the caveat that the parishioner who recieves the indulgence does some good work or an act of piety, like going on a pilgrimage or giving to the poor or the building of something for the public good, like, say, a bridge or a church.

It's odd then, to think that in the 16th century, one could use this privilege of the church to simply buy one's way out of purgatory. It strikes me as odd that the people who have the best access to scriptures that speak against greed and the hoarding of fine things and that the religion whose founder turned over seller's tables in the temple because the sellers were abusing a sacred space should then sell a faster ticket to heaven like a museum sells a tour pass that lets you bypass the lines outside. I remember when I first heard about indulgences, unclearly explained by my 10th grade world history student teacher in a rare moment of actual historical instruction. I was amazed that such a thing actually happened. I mean, the issue is always a little more subtle than you have time to cover in class, but to me it sounded like a money-making scheme, something a villian in a noel would do, something entirely unsuited to the church. It just seemed wrong. And what did they need all that money for anyway?

Oh. To build a church. This church, in fact.

Now, I'm not the only one who though there was something off about all this. The sanctioned selling of indulgences to build St. Peter's Basilica as you see it now is one of the things that set Martin Luther off on his 95 Thesis, started the Protestant Reformation and changed the face of Christianity as it was known. Even the Catholic Church itself wasn't left out of this change: the Protestant Reformation started a Counter Reformation that can be seen in the architecture of the time- churches were built to display more wonder and awe, to remind people of the amazing and astounding nature of the God to whom they came to pay homage, to worship. It was a great time of change in the world, with the Renaissance and all sorts of humanist ideas flying around among this era of debate and rupture in the Church.

Knowing all of this should have made walking into St. Peter's a more solemn, momentous moment, one full of conflict about visiting a place with such historical and cultural significance. Or so you'd think. But Sarai and I came down rather suddenly from the climb up to the cupola (definitely worth your while) and stumbled our way into a side door, spilling accidentally and abruptly out into the nave to stand astonished at this massive, beautiful, awesome space.

The nave at St. Peter's can fit most other churches in the world inside of it. It's bigger than the Florence Duomo with its inexpressible size and even if I tried to amaze you with the height and length and width of the church, you would not feel the awe that this space inspires. I made Sarai give me a couple of minutes to walk around by myself because this kind of amazement is not something that I'm particularly good at sharing with other people.

Hold on, let me give you some pictures for a second and some facts in the captions and then we can reconvene to talk about this place.

Michelangelo's Dome, whose top is 448 feet from the floor 

A statue in the nave. That little angel, you know, the one chilling at the bottom? TALLER THAN  A REGULAR HUMAN. 

Baldachin over the papal altar by Bernini. It's the height of a 7 story building.

The orange glow in my picture of the nave was this window. It was two American football fields away from where I took the picture. The dove itself is 6 feet tall.

Now, St. Peter's isn't the cathedral in Rome. I know, you're disappointed, your life is a lie, etc. The cathedral is, as previously mentioned, the seat of the bishop, in this case, the bishop of Rome, or the pope. And the pope's chair in Rome is San Giovanni in Laterano. St. Peter's is just a basilica, or a papal basilica since the pope tends to celebrate mass here when he's around, and a basilica is a church that is given that status because it contains some kind of relic. In this case, it's the tomb of this guy, St. Peter, whom you might have heard of as one of Jesus' closest friends and the first pope, you know, something like that. (I use sarcasm here because I have difficulty dealing with the importance of this spot.) Peter was martyred by that great guy Nero in AD 64, crucified upside down because he didn't think he was worthy to die in the same manner as his Lord, and buried right under where the altar stands in this church.

I was going to tell you about the history of building the church, starting out with the shrine over the burial site of St. Peter, which was originally marked with just a red rock, to the building of Old St. Peter's, started by Constantine, to the original plan for the church, but I figure you can read the wikipedia article just as well as I can. What stuck out to me, though, is when Michelangelo (man, he's just turning out to be my recent favorite of the ninja turtles) took over the design from Bramante & co, he said that he did it to the glory of God and to the honor of the apostle. Over the course of this trip, I've spent a lot of time thinking about why we have these huge churches, why there are these cathedrals. It's not a question I can answer, but I like what Michelangelo said. And if God truly needed a church to explain His glory to the world, though, I would point to this one.



You have saints lining the nave and side chapels with a couple of popes in tombs, so many sculptures to draw the eyes up to the distant ceiling. You can stand at the back and feel the expanse of the church without knowing the height of the distant construction over the papal altar. As you approach it, the canopy looms larger, just barely misaligned with Michelangelo's dome still higher above, truer to the burial place of the saint. There are the accouterments of a church dedicated to such a large fixture in Christianity- a statue of Peter with his curly hair, sitting where his feet can be worn smooth by approaching pilgrims,

 the Cathedra Petri or the throne of St. Peter, encased in bronze and enshrined above the altar in the main apse,

and two meter high letters declaring Peter the rock on which Christ will build the church as you look up towards the dome.

 At the same time, there's a wonderful peaceful dove window above the chair, supported by four church fathers, including two from the Greek tradition. The original plan was a Greek cross with even arms, until the nave was expanded to make a Latin cross. The current design still pays homage to that idea.

The thing is, you've got all of us walking around, made insignificant by the size of this church. You've got people climbing up to the dome- we watched part of a mass being performed in one of the side chapels in the transept from a safe distance on our climb up. You've got people crowding around the Pieta, which is such a wonderful, beautiful piece of sculpture that I had difficulty tearing my eyes from, hidden behind a bullet-proof glass divider.

And all of us, in all this space, what are we doing? You there, with the camera and guide book, do you know the great artists that designed this church? You, walking hand in hand with your mother, do you know who St. Peter was? You, sitting in the chairs in the back of the chapel, do you understand how many people have been here, how many have prayed here? How many popes, leaders of the largest group of followers of Christ on the planet, have been in this very same room as all of us, massive though this room is?

I cannot own this church. I cannot make it mine. I can listen to the telling and retelling of the stories of Peter and I can make the apostle a favorite character in my own understanding of the Gospel. I can love the Pieta and carry the image of the young Mary holding the dead Jesus in my heart and make it an outcry of my own mourning. And I can wonder and marvel at the saints up and down the nave and the dome and the ceiling, so far away, but I cannot own anything except that wonder. This space, this church, could never be a place that I worship the God I understand. It's too big, it's too distant, it's un-understandable for me.

But I can own the feeling of seeing the inside of this place for the first time, that kind of running excitement discovery that steps back when it realizes that this is not a conquerable landscape. (God, what a metaphor for You in my life.) I want to preserve that feeling forever, remembering the few seconds of my life when the things I know about a place didn't matter. Just being there was enough.

Sistine Chapel

Editor's note: Contains no pictures (I'm a good tourist... mostly) and ramblings. Very skipable. 

Imagine a regular sized chapel, with a regular sized ceiling and a regular sized altar. Now, cover every inch of that ceiling, all 5900 square feet, with scenes from Genesis, cover the walls with the prophets and the apostles, and cover that plain wall behind the regular altar with a huge, busy painting of the Last Judgement, so full of characters that there's no one easy place to let your eye rest. Now, cram that room full of tourists, tour guides and tour groups, plus a couple of security members, and you've got the Sistine Chapel.

I would almost pay (more) money to be able to have time to peruse the entirety of Michelangelo's chapel, without being jostled away to crane my neck up at the ceiling from a corner. Still, despite the inconvenience of other people (oh other people, how shall I ever learn to deal with you?), you really can't help being impressed by the work. Or I can't. Though you might be even more impressed if you didn't know too much about human history in general, like the girl who sat with her friends on a bench by the exit, gazing up in wonder and saying, in English, of course, "Can you imagine what it would be like to discover this?"

Oh, dear.

But then, I can pretend she was being more profound than intended. Michelangelo, when he scultped, said that he didn't create a sculpture so much as he freed what God had already put there. So to be in Michelangelo's head, as he designed the figures and painted them for four long years around the room, would have been something amazing beyond my comprehension. I don't understand artists. I could never have been this creative. It's easy enough to throw in a joke here to make things less serious (because Michelangelo totally had an awesome sense of humor), but save the link-clicking until we're done and then you can laugh away. Preserve the moment, friends.

Sarai and I had lost Christine in the Vatican museums as Sarai had gone back to look again at Raphael's School of Athens and The Disputa, so we swam through the crowds to some place that we could use Rick Steves' guidance to making sense of the massive artwork all around us. We traded the book back and forth and found the Creation of Adam- oddly difficult to find, seeing how it's so iconic and everything- and remarked on the missing plaster and all sorts of interesting things. But what captivated me, once I had flipped a few pages ahead, was the paragraphs on the Last Judgment. I actually left the spot Sarai and I had been standing and almost ran over to the metal screen that separates the back of the chapel from the altar.

The Last Judgement was painted behind the altar twenty-three years after the rest of the chapel. And the rest of the chapel is quite cheery in comparison, playing up the humanist themes of the early Renaissance. Now, in 1541, the Protestant Reformation has started to take its toll and Michelangelo wasn't so optimistic. What drew me to the gate was a passive phrase of Rick Steves', that Christ is coming in wrath with his hand raised to smite the wicked, and that he looks almost happy to be doling out his judgement. No, I thought. People don't paint my Jesus like that. Such a ridiculous suggestion, that Christ would come with glee in his wrath, if there was wrath at all.

You know, it's a different Jesus.

And the Last Judgement is enthralling. There are sinners and demons, angels and righetous ghosts. There's Mary and there's Charon. Even heaven doesn't look too appealing- it's all storm clouds and trumpets. I'm sure you've seen the picture of the condemned man, sitting on his cloud with his hands over his face, leaving one eye uncovered to stare at you in despair. I'd think the pope was being melodramatic when he said upon seeing the painting, "Lord, charge me not with my sins when thou shalt come on the day of judgement!" but, honestly, I could be a little worried about my salvation myself, and this just from looking at pigments on a wall.

And poor Michelangelo! I wouldn't have wanted to be in his head to discover this part of the chapel. I couldn't have painted this and I wouldn't want to be around in a time that inspired a painting such as this. There's a saint coming up to Christ, holding the sagging skin of a melted man, which is said to be Michelangelo's self-portrait. I've said the painting is enthralling- given the chance, it entrances you and draws you in, the kind of work that you have to be drawn out of with a shiver.

Makes you think maybe we shouldn't have split the church in the first place.

Roman Beaches

You know, generally, in life, I'm a fan of the beach. There's plenty of sun and when you get hot, there's plenty of water. You need a copious (man, I haven't used that word in a while. Copious.) amount of sunscreen to make it through, but really, it's a lovely time to loose yourself in a book or nap or people watch.

The thing about the Roman beach, though, apart from the black-grey sand (seriously, the beach looked like pepper and I was quite surprised), is that it's a bit of a trip from the city out to the coast. We probably spent a good three hours getting to our vacation away from our vacation, spending only a euro but, in terms of stress, should strain and sweat, we might as well have taken a cab.

It was wonderful to be at a beach town, though. They have McDonalds and little beach shops and, most importantly, easy access to the beach. It was literally right across the road from our hostel. We spent most, almost all, of our few days at the Roman beach out on the beach, occasionally swimming out in the sea but mostly worshipping the sun god or hiding from his anger under our rented umbrella. I was a little jealous of the old Italian man who walked the beach setting up chairs and taking down the left-over umbrellas, impervious to the sun's rays as he shuffled over burning sand, pipe in mouth and trash collector in hand.

The amount of people on the beach was the surprising thing to me. You probably think at this point that all I do is walk around with my mouth open staring in wonder, but honestly, once you get past the different colored sand, a beach is a beach. The people are what make it different. The beach proved the assertion that Europeans are just a lot more comfortable with nudity than Americans in general are, but other than that, it was just full of families, groups of friends, couples, solo sun bathers, everyone enjoying the same stretch of potential glass.

But the beach was full. Even on Sunday morning (it was just so much easier to stay at the beach than to try to go to a morning service in town and anyway, once you've seen one simple morning mass, you've seen them all; plus, the pope was out of town, so there was no way he was holding mass in the city anyway), people swarmed the sand, distinctly not going to church. Maybe it shouldn't surprise me, but I figured the country that had a guard at the door of their basilica making sure your skirt wasn't a few inches too short would have empty beaches on a Sunday morning.

Still, you could say we were worshipping something. I can understand why ancients would have worshipped a sun god. Maybe the sunlight is particularly powerful because of our ruinous areosol practices, but anything that can turn my skin red from such a distance, high in the sky, deserves my attention at the very least. It's just simpler- no doctrines to listen to people argue over, no deeply packed symbolism to try to uncover, no potenital mistakes to be made.

Just laying on a beach, worshipping the sun.