Al Fresco

So my Fancy Simple post today is actually a happy coincidence because I wanted to do a post about this last week, but no time. Last Thursday was the Catholic holiday, All Saints Day. I love All Saints Day because it is like the anti-Halloween and I am such a ying-yang person that I love to have it come full circle like that. However, the other reason that I love All Saints Day is because it was on that date in 1512 that the Pope revealed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the first time. So the answer to what inspires my faith the most? The Sistine Chapel.

I know that this is a totally sterotypical Catholic response, and a totally generic Art History response, but I don't care and I'll tell you why. I saw the chapel for the first time right after my thirteenth birthday. My uncle and his family were living in Milan at the time and my aunt took us to Rome to visit her mother and to sightsee. My other cousins who had been to Rome many times were bored as bored could be and bless them trooped through it all just for me. While I cannot claim that this day made me an Art History major since I did not even know there was such a thing, it did make me understand how art could inspire faith. This is the first thing you see when you walk in the door, the Pieta.

Then you wander through some of the most famous mosaics and sculpture in the world and you come across this.

Now I can say that probably many things on this trip were probably wasted on me, terrific food, a beautiful language, but I can honestly say that I remember every single thing that I saw from the moment that i entered St. Peter's Square. It probably was also the time in my life when I discovered that I have a photographic memory. The Vatican is an amazing and terrible place. It is all the piety and wonder of my faith and also the terrible excess. Today i would be hard pressed to look at the Sistine Chapel and not think about the fact that Michelangelo was forced to complete the chapel against his will by a war mongering Pope under conditions that would easily amount to torture in our modern age. Yet, you look at the Pieta or the Chapel and God becomes real. Humankind's desire to have a miraculous faith, the greatest story ever told, comes alive. The Bible became a real, breathing document of shame and redemption. Catholicism became more than church on Sunday, it became a culture, a complete civilization of people, a rich history that changed the world for good and bad.

I still wonder if my fondness for my faith doesn't stem more from my love of history, than from my love of God. Either way, for Olivia's thirteenth we will be going to Rome.