ON LOSING YOUR CHILDREN IN THE VATICAN
“WHERE DID THE KIDS GO?” my wife asked—a classic question one parent asks another.
“I don’t know. I thought they were with you,” I replied—the classic response to that classic question.
Not that we were really worried. The Vatican Museum channels the thousands in one direction through its long galleries, with little opportunity for deviation. Even pausing for a moment to linger on an object or painting sets up eddies in the flow, building a pressure of impatience that soon gets the feet moving again on toward the Sistine Chapel, where we had just arrived. Besides, our son was then twenty-six and our daughter eighteen. Besides, it was the Vatican.
“I’ll go back and see if I can find them,” Diane said, continuing with the whispered tones we had been using.
A brave offer. The river into the Sistine Chapel pours through one narrow door, flooding into a lake of all manner of humanity that eventually trickles out the other end via another small door. She would have to squirm hard to go upstream.
“Okay. Best leave me your backpack, though,” I said with a hush. “So you can wiggle through a bit easier.”
“Thanks. You stay right here. Don’t move.”
Off she went. I turned my eyes upward and all around, joining the collective quiet wonder at Michelangelo’s vision of the divine in The Last Judgment, forty-five feet high up the Sistine Chapel front wall and continuing onto the ceiling, humbling believer and nonbeliever alike.
But I soon found my mind drifting toward reflection on what was not in that vision. Maybe it was the oppressive stuffiness of the packed room. Maybe it was the over-loud announcement in Italian and then English that periodically curdled the air with “This is a holy place of reflection. Please maintain silence. No photographs.” Or words to that effect—a disembodied voice of rules coming down from on high. I don’t know. For whatever reason, the mood the chapel conjured in me was analytic, not beatific. I started mentally ticking off the absences from the presences. No animals. No forests. No gardens, aside from Adam and Eve being evicted from Eden in one of Michelangelo’s ceiling panels. No farming. No eating. No laughing. No sex. No politicians. No people of color. Almost no women. Such a heaven seemed a starkly limited place. But what troubled me most was the space’s grand declaration that this was all for the good.
My neck was tired by the time Diane came back, still without Sam and Eleanor. She motioned a shush at me, as I started to inquire. I stood by as Diane took her own look at the fabulously painted walls and ceilings. She was getting it more than me. But Diane, too, soon had her fill of wonder, perhaps limited by mild parental separation anxiety. We headed for the door, fresher air, and freedom to talk aloud.
Eventually we washed up in the coffee shop and took turns standing outside it at a corner between two corridors—one leading to the outdoors and one to the shop, a corner past which every visitor must eventually course—until Sam and Eleanor appeared with excited looks. They had found some side passages we had missed, leading to whole other lands of art. Literally. The Vatican’s Egyptian Museum. Its Ethnological Museum. Its Cartography Museum. And its fabulous gallery of Greek and Roman busts.
The children must, in time, lead the parents. Diane and I followed delightedly, taking another look through the long Vatican galleries until they showed us the entrances to the side passages we had missed. Here there were animals, often combined with images of a highly diverse divine. Here there were representations of forests and farms and gardens, of streams and rivers and oceans, and of human labor in them. Here there was overt sexuality (albeit with many a fig-leaf later added to the genitals of statues). Here there were lots and lots of political figures—kings, queens, emperors, pharaohs, chiefs, and more. Here there were gods and goddesses in conflict, pursuing projects and ambitions, often involving the conflicts, projects, and ambitions of humans. And here there were many representations of women and people of color. Here we found life more nearly as it is really lived, an entanglement of world, being, and passion—of nature, faith, and the human community—where the good and the bad are not easily separated and where politics cannot be escaped.
The ecologically and egalitarian minded have to wonder why the world’s dominant religions have long relegated these basic experiences of the human condition mainly to their side passages. The same question could, and should, be asked of our dominant philosophies of nature and environment. In this book, I try to answer that question—a question that, at last, traditions of nature and religion increasingly find themselves asking as well. They ask it because many among the newer generations, and some among the older ones, no longer rush past those other corridors, and find much meaning and even delight there. So I wish might we all.