Song of Fire

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Song: “The Blue Grotto” by Jon O’Bergh
Click on music player to listen

My family was nominally Christian. Mom had been raised Protestant and spent a year at a Catholic boarding school; Dad had been raised Lutheran but was an avid reader of tracts by mystical groups likes the Rosicrucians. My sisters both attended a Methodist church as young girls. Perhaps exhausted by this efflorescence of beliefs, by the time I was born my parents had lost interest in organized religion. But a small, ceramic Jesus painted in egg-shell pastels of sky blue, cream and pink stood on my nightstand. He carried a lamb around his neck, and that image of compassion represented everything that I knew about God.

I had never been in church, but by the time I was ten I had spent many Friday evenings in the synagogue attended by my friends Lenny and Linda. Their parents always invited me along, and I dutifully sat through the service as the Torah was removed from the cabinet and the Hebrew words intoned by the rabbi. Lenny, being older than me by two months, was naturally our ringleader. Fresh from the mischief of our Martian misadventure, he came up with the idea for pranks following each service. We replaced the sugar in a bowl next to the coffee urn with salt. We slipped slices of cake onto the chairs behind matrons as they stood around chatting. Nonetheless, I was always welcomed back to temple. It seemed to me that the congregation had an infinite capacity for forgiveness.

In college, a friend invited me to Maranatha. I enjoyed the camaraderie of fellowship — everyone was so preternaturally kind — but I had a hard time accepting that God would be so cruel as to create us to be imperfect, then condemn us to an eternity of suffering because of mistakes we would naturally be inclined to make. Wasn’t that a little irrational and unfair? The God of the born-again Christians reminded me too much of old man Huntley who, when I was a kid, swam with goggles every day precisely at five p.m. and was always shouting at us to walk our bikes. I thought of the Epicurean dictum:

If God is willing to prevent evil but unable to do so, then he is not omnipotent.
If God is able to prevent evil but unwilling, then he is not good.
If God is both able and willing, then how does evil exist?

A dainty nun stood looking at an exhibit of industrial sculpture in a small, abandoned Baroque church in the heart of Rome. The walls had been almost stripped bare except for a towering arch and pilasters with the heads of putti in the nave. The nun clutched her program and scrutinized a pair of tall, flattened cylinders with flaps peeled away to reveal interiors painted in Renaissance colors. The sculptures reflected the city outside the walls of the church: soot and grime streaked on buildings, broken columns littering the ancient ruins, graffiti lining an alleyway, chaotic traffic, exuberant life bubbling out of disorder and decay.

To appreciate Rome’s history as the one-time center of Christianity, I determined to visit its diverse range of churches. In the Pantheon, the structural brick arches are exposed above one particular trio of niches in which the central niche holds a crucified Christ. The rawness of the brick, contrasting with the smooth marble elsewhere on the walls, heightens the poignancy of the image. Built at the wishes of the emperor Hadrian as a temple to all of the gods in the year 118, it must have been an even more impressive structure before the gold tiles were ripped off the roof. Fortunately, the structure was preserved by being appropriated early on as a Christian church. In the center of the dome, an oculus lets in the sky, and light floods the circular room.

Nearby is the Jesuit mother church of Sant’ Ignazio di Loyola, built between 1626 and 1650 and dedicated to the founder of the order of the Society of Jesus. Its gilded interior reflects the beauty and opulence of the Baroque at its best. Trompe l’oeil frescoes by Andrea Pozzo, painted in 1685, adorn the ceilings of the nave. Tricks of perspective create the illusion of the church’s colonnades stretching up into heaven. There is a warmth in this church that is more comforting than the colossal soaring spaces of St. Peter’s basilica where one feels lost as if in a foreign airport terminal. As beautiful as St. Peter’s is architecturally, the scale of Sant’ Ignazio di Loyola mediates the relationship between the human and divine with a much greater sense of humanity.

At St. Peter’s, I bought a rosary for a friend and dipped it in a basin of holy water, then climbed the stairs to the top of the magnificent dome designed by Bramante and Michelangelo and finished in 1589. The dome is an awe-inspiring achievement, a conduit that joins the sky above with the subterranean spaces below where two thousand years of Christian history slumber. After leaving the basilica, I went to the Vatican Museums, particularly to see the Sistine Chapel. The softness in the outlines of Michelangelo’s massive, muscular figures of men and women speak of another union: the confluence of the feminine and the masculine.

On a rainy, humid autumn day I ended up at the crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione, the church where the bones of Capuchin monks have been turned into macabre décor. Skulls brown with age are piled in arches over robed skeletons, while spinal vertebrae are glued in florid patterns on the vaults and ceilings, and tibias are arrayed like art. “Tante osse,” whispered a little girl there with her parents: so many bones. Apparently Italian insouciance starts early.

I traveled south with a friend to the Bay of Naples. The day we went to Pompeii was drizzly and wet. On the Circumvesuviana train, a man answered his cell phone. Although the caller couldn’t see his gestures, the man still instinctively shrugged his shoulders, lifted his eyebrows, craned his neck. We disembarked at the station and entered the narrow gates of the ancient city. The intermittent rain had polished the flagstone streets a shiny black. We wandered through block after block of buildings, visited lavish houses with atriums and murals, stepped into an open-air bar on the market street known as the “Street of Abundance,” strolled past temples and theaters, contemplated erotic murals in a bordello. It was easy to picture people doing the daily things they always have, not so unlike us: stopping for a drink in a bar with friends, going to the theater, hosting a dinner party, watching athletes at the arena, making love, praying. The Bible records that the apostle Paul visited the Bay of Naples during the reign of Nero. Archaeologists and historians have proposed that a small group of converts began meeting shortly thereafter in one of the houses in Herculaneum, the sister city that was destroyed with Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted eighteen years later. In one of the upstairs rooms of this house, on the wall above an item of wooden furniture that could have served as a shrine, is the outline of a cross. It appears that someone pried loose the cross, perhaps during those apocalyptic last days, leaving behind a plate of incense atop the shrine. It is a matter of interpretation whether Christians indeed lived in that house, but in Pompeii, in the atrium of a house on the “Street of the Overhanging Balcony,” a wall is inscribed with the word “Christianos.”

Sitting on our hotel balcony the next morning, I could see the rough shape of Vesuvius looming directly across the bay, a dark outline in the dawn light. A small promontory of trees and shrubs jutted out beneath the balcony, beyond which a cliff plunged down into the sea. Ferries were already leaving the Sorrento marina, carrying passengers to destinations around the bay. A band of gray haze hugged the horizon, slowly tinting pink and orange in the rising sun.

On Sorrento’s periphery, four- and five-story buildings stretch for blocks, bearing the elegant, rectilinear lines of 1950s architecture. Sidewalks inlaid with a stone mosaic pattern reminiscent of the wings of seagulls wind throughout the city past palm trees and cliffs that drop steeply into the water. In the heart of town, older buildings and medieval alleyways encircle the piazza. The prior evening, strolling to dinner, my friend and I came upon a Madonna that was lit by black light in the niche of a building, glowing in the night like a streetwalker. In a nearby shop, images of Jesus, Botticelli putti, and Leonardo Di Caprio.

A series of stairs followed the sharp turns of the cobbled road that squeezed its way down the gully to the marina. As the morning sun rose, we descended the stairs to catch the ferry that would take us to the isle of Capri, legendary home of the Sirens. The island was only a short distance from Sorrento, its whitish gray limestone cliffs brightly reflecting the sun. We arrived at the Grande Marina, which sits at the bottom of a saddle of land between the island’s two peaks. A funicular climbed the hill from the marina to one side of the saddle where the heart of the town of Capri is situated. We followed narrow pedestrian streets draped with honeysuckle and bougainvillea, passing beautiful villas and hotels. Built right into the cliffs and hills, many parts of the town are inaccessible by car. We lingered in a piazza that seemed to float high above the sea, looking out across the glimmering water to the sweep of the bay.

We decided to take a mini-bus across the island to the famed Grotta Azzurra — the Blue Grotto. The bus followed an impossibly narrow road of hairpin turns that perched perilously on the edge of a cliff. As I stood clutching the overhead bar, I peered out the window straight down the cliff, which seemed only inches away. It was a relief to finally emerge intact in the town of Anacapri. We walked the long road downhill toward the turquoise sea.

The Romans built a small villa on the land above the Blue Grotto, probably as part of a nymphaeum, the remains of which are still visible. A nymphaeum was a sacred monument consecrated to nymphs, who traditionally inhabited the site of springs and grottos. Nymphaea served three purposes: as sanctuaries, reservoirs, and assembly areas. The Romans decorated the grotto with statues that have since been removed to museums. There is evidence that they built a tunnel that led down into the grotto, providing easier access than the small aquatic opening.

Down at the entrance to the grotto, a school of rowboats rose and fell on the swells of the water. We descended the steps to a dock and climbed into one rowboat with another tourist couple. Our boatman instructed us in halting English how to sit with one of us between the other’s legs so we could simultaneously recline, which was necessary to enter the low opening of the grotto. We awaited our turn at the mouth of the cave. A line of red barnacles and green algae demarcated the high tide level along the cliff. Our boatman stood over me, gauging the swells of the inky blue water, his legs straddling my face.

At the lowest point between swells, the boatman vigorously drew back the oars and propelled us through the opening as he bent over. Inside the grotto, the water was calm, glowing a neon blue in the darkness. Sunlight reflecting through the submerged part of the opening created the supernatural glow. Water dripped from the oars and reverberated in the dim quiet. As our eyes adjusted, I began to see a subtle blue light reflected on the ceiling and walls. It was easy to imagine why the Romans considered this grotto sacred. It was a church hewn by nature, transformed by the interplay of water and light.

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