My Life with the Saints

When I was in fourth grade, I met my first Catholic. He was a boy in my class, who invited me over to his house one day. I don’t remember a crucifix or a Madonna; I don’t remember the term catechism or CCD being mentioned; I don’t even remember my friend’s name or what he looked like. All I remember is Butler’s Lives of the Saints, on the bookshelf above his head.

With Father Jim in the Holy Land

Some books you look back on and realize they defined an era in your life. Nordhoff & Hall’s Bounty trilogy was that for me the summer I turned thirteen and spent a month by the sea.

Recently I wrote about three books that form a sort of triptych of my religious journey. I didn’t realize that when I read them.

Now I’m reading—listening to, actually—Fr. James Martin’s latest book, Jesus: A Pilgrimage, and I know it’s the right book at the right time. But then the first Martin book I ever read, My Life with the Saints, was like that too.

My Life with the Saints marked the threshold of my entry into the Catholic Church. I read it in a weekend, started going to morning mass on Monday, and enrolled in RCIA the following weekend. As we say only when we mean it, God’s honest truth.

I’m about to embark on two thirty-day experiences, and I realized tonight that Jesus: A Pilgrimage is a perfect primer for each.

Something Heroic for God

I have written about being brought to the Catholic Church by the Saints, and I was. But I am thinking about the Saints differently today. Previously, I thought of them as inspiring me, as pushing on me from the past. Instead, I wonder if I wasn’t always calling to them from the present. That they finally “responded” to me means that I started to listen.

Word for the Day: Saints

“Let what you heard from the beginning remain in you,” writes John in today’s reading. The word I heard from the beginning of my pilgrim walk in the Catholic Church was saints. 

People are surprised by this. I did not hear the voice of God. I did not hear the call of Christ. I was not attracted by the Holy Eucharist or the sacrament of confession.

I heard about the saints. I was moved by the witness of certain men and women who had lived by the teachings of the Catholic Church since the time of Jesus of Nazareth. I was impressed by their example. Eventually, when another system of thought disintegrated within me, I leapt to join the saints. Thus the phrase in the creed that moves me most is the communion of saints. 

Joining the saints was a leap. I didn’t know much about the Church when I entered RCIA and started my six-month basic training in Catholicism. I only knew that I had always wanted God in my life, that the path I had been following led me nowhere, and that these holy folks seemed to understand where to walk. It was as simple as that.

I think of this today, as the New Year 2015 opens before me with its gift of possibility, because my daily mass reader reminds me that today we honor Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen. Who, you say? That’s what I said too. Never heard of them.

The Romantic Poet and The Little Flower

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) gaze at one another from opposite ends of the 19th century. They had so much in common. Each was spoiled by parents. Each had four adoring sisters. Each died young. The poet Shelley (left) drowned in a sailing accident at the age of 29. The Carmelite nun Thérèse drowned in her own lungs, dead of tuberculosis at 24. Each was “astonishingly single-minded in the pursuit of his ideals,” to quote historian Paul Johnson on Shelley. But only one of them was “ruthless and even brutal in disposing of anyone who got in the way” (Johnson on Shelley again).

Summing Up My Memoir

After reading my conversion memoir, a priest friend told me, “You, Webster, are the last man who should have ended up a Catholic in the first decade of the twenty-first century.”

I believe that my friend said this because of two blots on my résumé: (1) For thirty years I followed an alternative spiritual program that set Christ aside. (2) The man who introduced me to this program, whom I have called Gulliver in my memoir, abused me sexually, beginning when I was nineteen years old.

And here I am for all that—a happy Catholic without regrets six years after my conversion. Hence the priest’s comment.

For those wishing to know how I came to the Catholic Church, here is a table of contents followed by a short summary of the subject matter:

The Warrior and The Wannabe: Joan of Arc Meets Jean-Jacques Rousseau

As I approach the third anniversary of my reception into the Catholic Church, I am re-reading the book that I credit with bringing me to the Church, Fr. James Martin’s My Life with the Saints, the straw that broke the back of my staggering, wayward camel. By coincidence, I am meanwhile listening, via audiobook, to a strangely parallel work: Intellectuals, by the conservative historian Paul Johnson.

Merton and Marx: The Power of Ideas

I matriculated at Amherst College, where as a freshman in the fall of 1969 I took an intro sociology course surveying the likes of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx (left). After a year off and a transfer, I graduated from Brandeis University, at a time when the voices of neo-Marxist professor Herbert Marcuse and Communist activist Angela Davis, Brandeis ’65, still echoed on campus. The influence of Karl Marx at American colleges of that era, 40 years ago, is astonishing to me now. More astonishing is that I accepted this influence, in the sense that I believed Marx must be someone I should know, a great thinker, a resident of the Pantheon. I was neither a Catholic nor an Evangelical at the time, just a lapsed Episcopalian, which is to say a loose-thinking liberal.

Our Camino, Chapter 1: Preparation

The second time, it began with a phone call.

It was Columbus Day 2011. With the day off, my wife and I were dawdling over coffee. She had just agreed to a surprise movie date in the afternoon. The movie, though she didn’t know it yet, and had no reason to know it, was “The Way,” Emilio Estevez’s film about the Camino de Santiago, starring Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen (pictured).

This thousand-year-old pilgrimage route stretches from the Pyrenees west across the north of Spain, ending at Santiago de Compostela, the burial place of St. James the Apostle.

I had wanted to walk the Camino for some time now. Since I converted to the Catholic faith in 2008 and began trying out everything Catholic from singing in the choir to serving at funerals (I was like my pastor’s dog, famous for running around the rectory garden eating everything in sight, including the baby Jesus in a crèche), the Camino had moved to the top of my list.

I was already a long-distance exercise walker. I had walked since my mid-forties, when I realized that I wanted to have my own knees and hips when I turned sixty. So walking five hundred miles didn’t daunt me, and to do it in a Catholic way thrilled me.

I began hoping to walk the Camino in the summer of 2011, arriving in Santiago on the Feast Day of St. James, July 25, my sixtieth birthday. But as a freelance writer I was offered a major book project, agreed to deliver the manuscript on a tight deadline, and missed out on Spain.

That was the first beginning. This was the second:

“Hello?”

“Dad?”

“Hi Marian!” I recognized my younger daughter’s voice. “Day off?”

“Working at home today,” she answered. For over a year now my daughter had been working unhappily in a cubicle as an entry-level management consultant. I knew that Marian was thinking of taking some time off to reconsider her career choice. She was only twenty-three, plenty of time yet for new directions.

On the phone, Marian told me that her plans were firming up. She and an old friend had agreed to quit their jobs and spend the winter in Asia. Then Marian wanted to return alone through Europe. 

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

 “And then, Dad,” she said, “I was wondering—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I’ve always loved the stories you tell about the trips you took with Granddad before he died, and—it’s not that I think you’re going to die or anything, but—I was wondering—if I came back through Europe next spring, would you consider—?”

“Yes,” I said, “I would.” I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew what she was going to ask.

“Dad, listen, would you consider walking the Camino de Santiago with me?”

“Yes, I said I would. Yes, I will. When do we begin?”

To believe in God is to know that there is no such thing as a coincidence.


Planning

Eventually we agreed to begin in early May 2012. We planned to cover the 500 miles (800 km) from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago de Compostella in five to six weeks, arriving on or about Father’s Day in mid-June.

The map here shows the traditional “Camino Francés,” that is, the path Marian and I proposed to walk, east to west.

At Thanksgiving Marian came home, led the way to REI, and helped me pick out thirty pounds of hiking gear. One is supposed to carry only 10 percent of one’s body weight on a long walk such as the Camino. My weight was about 210. I wanted it closer to 190. As a friend of mine put it, I began trying to move 20 pounds from my six-pack to my back pack.

With a regular walking regimen, I lost ten pounds by February 1, and by late March I was taking longer hikes, up the coast to Gloucester (14 miles one way, taking the train home), or inland to Ipswich (22 miles round-trip)—without weight on my back and then with it. I lost another five to seven pounds. I bought the best guide books and read about ten personal accounts of walking the Camino. I rationed my pack weight down to about 22 pounds, hard to cut it more. But I became convinced, and I think my conviction was correct, that the only final way to prepare for the Camino de Santiago is to walk it.

My final purchase was a walking stick, which I picked up in Lourdes, on the way to St. Jean Pied de Port with Marian. I had the stick engraved with the name of my patron saint, Joseph. The man at the shop gave me the option of having my own name engraved. When there was a momentary confusion about whether Joseph was my name or whether perhaps I thought that I myself was a saint, the merchant set me straight by saying, “That's a hat on your head, not a halo.”

With my walking stick in hand, I followed Marian to the train station in Lourdes. Thank God she had inherited her mother's sense of direction and not my own. On the train to Bayonne, in the Bayonne station, and particularly on the single car that forged upriver from Bayonne to St. Jean, we began to meet fellow pilgrims. The first surprise was that the average pilgrim was closer to my age (60) than Marian's (now 24).

I began asking my fellow passengers why they were walking the Camino—what their intentions were. The answers included no reference to Jesus, Christ, or the Church. Peter from Germany, whom I liked immediately, pointed to his heart and said that this was the right time in his life for him to be doing this. A man from Italy, who spoke no English but made a game effort to communicate with me, said that he was making the Camino for a sixth time because he has found that the long march refreshes his spirit.


Kaserna

Everyone I asked said they were beginning the Camino the following day, Sunday, May 13. Marian and I decided to wait until Monday. As a result we stayed Sunday night at Kaserna, which set the tone for our entire trip.

You may have heard of the Knights Hospitaliers. Like other orders of fighting priests and friars formed in the middle ages, their purpose was to protect pilgrims, most famously to Jerusalem but also on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The term hospitalier is still in use in France today. It refers to those who run refuges.

The first two hospitaliers Marian and I met on our pilgrimage were Jacques and Monique Mullon, originally from Surgères near La Rochelle, France. For the past three years they had been serving as resident, voluntary hosts at Kaserna, a refuge owned by the local Catholic parish. (I sketched the front door to Kaserna in my journal, left.) Jacques and Monique took their baptismal names from saints James (Santiago) and Monica (mother of Augustine). They were like beacons to us, signposts at the head of The Way.

The Mullons were, I would guess, in their sixties, and they had four grown children. Jacques had begun his career as a teacher, then moved into sales. Monique was the devout Catholic in the family, while Jacques was a long-time confirmed atheist. In the Mullon family, he was famous for not being able to carry a tune. When the family went driving together in their car, it was Monique who did all the singing.

On our arrival at Kaserna on Sunday afternoon, I was soon in conversation with Monique, using my leftovers of French. I asked her what percentage of pilgrims to Compostela are vraiment religieux, genuinely religious. She told me that she makes no distinction between religious pilgrims and just pilgrims. “Le chemin vous fait pélérin,” she told me. The Way makes you a pilgrim.

Monique illustrated this idea with a story about her husband, Jacques. After their last child had left home, Jacques agreed to walk the Camino with Monique. It was the first trip they had taken together without children since their honeymoon many years before. The way made Jacques a pilgrim.

As he put it himself over dinner on Sunday evening, he was struck by so many gifts and graces that he could no longer live believing that we are the source of our own goodness. He was baptized soon after he returned from the Camino, and in time Jacques was received into the Catholic Church.

At dinner, Monique took great pleasure in explaining that, as soon as Jacques became a Catholic, his tone-deafness was cured. He began to sing! She said that he had been listening to all the songs she had sung through the years, memorizing them. Now, out they came!

She joked that her convert husband was rejuvenated once he was a Catholic, filled with energy that she found hard to keep up with. She made a hilarious French gesture with both arms, suggesting a very old woman trundling along behind her over-energetic husband.

In my Sunday afternoon chat with Monique, she said that she believes many so-called atheists have the seeds of conversion inside themselves. She told the story of Jacques’s father, another “confirmed” atheist. On his deathbed, her father-in-law refused to eat. Monique apparently had a way with him, however, and ordering some soup, she spoon-fed it to him. “Do you really believe that there is life on the other side?” her father-in-law suddenly asked Monique. She replied, “The fact that you ask the question means you already know the answer.”

“The Camino makes you a pilgrim,” Monique had said to me. That was a lesson I began learning in earnest the following day, Monday, May 14, 2012, when Marian and I said good-bye to the Mullons at the front door of Kaserna and headed over the mountains into Spain.

(Continue reading Chapter 2 here.)

My Catholic Bucket List

I hear it all the time now that I’ve arrived at this milestone: “You don’t look sixty.” I smile and say thank-you, resisting the ready cliché that says sixty is the new forty.

Sixty is not the new forty. Sixty is sixty. The Psalmist (90:10) offers us three score years and ten, and I accept the terms of that deal. So this is my last decade then? After seventy, it’ll all be gravy, overtime, sudden death.

Where Is My St. Paul Moment?

When I was a teen, I wanted to be St. Paul: struck from my horse by the force of a truth that was certain. I actively hunted for conversion in books, as if a phrase could set my life on course.

I looked for conversion in people too. Once I thought I had found certainty in a bearded guru. Eventually I found it in an unbearded teacher.

Of course, the light that flooded me at those moments was not precisely a “great light from the sky,” like St. Paul’s light in today’s reading from Acts. It was not a light associated with the voice of Jesus the Nazorean. But I was avid for light and I took what I could get.

The important thing I did, and it seems reckless to me now, was to follow the light when once I saw it.

In Case You Thought I Was a Saint . . .

I am reading two books just now, one devotional, one a guilty pleasure. Each book came to my attention through a news article, one 33 years ago, the other this Sunday, via the New York Times Book Review.

I know something about cults and a bit more about scotch, so when I read the Times review of The Great Leader, the new novel by Jim Harrison (left), about an alcoholic state policeman who hunts a sketchy cult leader, I bought the Kindle edition on impulse.

A Brit Who’s Lived a Parallel Life to My Own

Thanks to Carl E. Olson at Catholic World Report for an article telling me that somewhere across the Pond I have a double. I swear I don’t look that old, my eyes are better, and I have more hair, but otherwise I recognize A.N. Wilson (left) as just like me. 

In an article Friday in the Daily Mail, Wilson tells of leaving Christianity only to return later in life, but not before passing through the fires of the sexual revolution. His title is self-explanatory: “I’ve lived through the greatest revolution in sexual mores in our history. The damage it’s done appals me.”

Born just nine months before me, Wilson has written books on Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, and Jesus Christ. He returned to Christianity in 2009, a year after me. 

Here are some highlights of his article:

The Lord: Chapter 1, “Origin and Ancestry”

My dear friend,

How do you explain the contradictions among the four Gospels? Why does Mark say one thing, and Matthew and Luke quite another, while John (left) seems to be speaking from another planet?

Romano Guardini takes up this question in the first chapter of his book The Lord, examining how the four evangelists explain Jesus’s origins and ancestry. It’s an important question to me, these apparent contradictions. I remember religion classes back at school where, under the watchful eye of Mr. Brookfield, among others, we used to interpret religious texts the way we interpreted Crime and Punishment under Ploegstra or Moby Dick in Gray’s AmLit class. We came up with some pretty wild stuff, those of us not relying exclusively on Cliffs Notes.

If all we need is the Bible, as most Protestants claim, what prevents scriptural interpretation from being all over the map, like twelve different adolescent voices, some still finding their range, around a Harkness table?

Daryl K’s Final Response

The Daryl-Webster debate ends here. Daryl sent me new comments in an e-mail, and I have agreed to publish these, giving him the last word. His comments are below the asterisks halfway down this post.

I have only two final comments of my own.

1. If you read to the end of Daryl’s latest message, you may conclude, as I have, that he was set off by my stories of the guru I have called Gulliver, especially by my admission of being sexually abused. I am not surprised that Daryl found these accounts offensive. I’m sure others have had similar reactions, though unvoiced. I did not publish these accounts with any sense of pride, and I never meant them to be an exposé.

I meant only to chart as honestly as possible my improbable path to the Catholic Church. I think I have made that clear enough previously.

2. In my most recent e-mail reply to Daryl, I asked him to consider replying to comments by Neil Yetts, who is a friend of mine. Not only a friend but the RCIA teacher who led me through my first catechesis before I was received into the Church in 2007–2008. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate Neil “having my back”!

I am reprinting Neil’s questions to Daryl before Daryl’s final message, in case Daryl wishes to reply to these questions below. If his replies are civil, I will publish them; and then that will be my final word on a debate that probably should never have happened in this space.

Neil’s message—mostly questions for Daryl—is in italics here.

American Catholics, The Camino is Calling!

When I began preparing to walk the Camino de Santiago this spring, I expected a mob scene, especially from the USA. How could American Catholics not turn out in record numbers after seeing "The Way," the Emilio Estevez film about the Camino? Well, they haven't. This traditional Catholic pilgrimage has become a hotspot of European cultural tourism—and a terrible missed opportunity for American Catholics. Half the people I have met, though they may say they're not religious, are practically begging to be evangelized. Where are you, Catholic guys and gals?

I have been walking the Camino with my daughter Marian for nearly three weeks now and am posting about it every day. I have some thoughts about why US Catholics are so poorly represented. (I've met more Korean Catholics than American ones, and more Aussies than Yanks.) And I have some personal experiences that demonstrate what a fertile field this Compostela ("field of stars") can be.

First, the thoughts. Compared with "secular Europe," the USA may be far more religious, but we're also far more fat. I have walked with German women in their mid-70s who would put to shame US women half their age who take zumba classes seven days a week. I traveled this morning with a typical French retiree: at 72, he has three children, three grandchildren, but likes nothing better than bicycling in the Alps for a week at a time with men his own age. He walked the soles right off my 60-year-old feet for 25 kilometers. It's one thing to do 50 minutes of cardio at your local health club, and quite another to walk eight hours a day for 35 days, without complaint beneath a 20-pound pack and 90-degree sunshine. For what? How about for Jesus?

We Americans also need to learn some foreign languages. I'm not talking about fulfilling a two-year Spanish requirement in high school. I'm talking about actually desiring to communicate with people from other cultures. Europeans put us to shame, making Yanks look like self-satisfied isolationists. Fortunately, I know a good deal of French, and Marian is fluent in Spanish, so between us we can communicate with roughly half of all we meet. I am tempted to resume my high-school German studies. That plus Italian would allow me to evangelize virtually the whole world. (Most Koreans speak some English.)

And OK, here's a third reason. We must not care enough. I mean, about evangelizing. About witnessing openly to our Catholic faith on a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route that, let's face it, would not exist but for Jesus Christ and his apostle James. Anyone who walks this Camino—atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, deist, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, New Ager, or Taoist (in alphabetical order, of course)—cannot escape a simple fact, no matter what their attitude to the Church or to Christ: They wouldn't be here if not for Him. They might be walking across England, or trekking the Himalayas, but they wouldn't be here.

Yet Spanish road signs now proclaim the Camino an itinerario cultural Europeo, a European cultural journey. And most people here, when you ask them, will say they are not religious, but have come for a vacation, for the exercise, to see a bit of history, to challenge themselves. But like the four characters in "The Way," many will say more when you scratch the surface. Remember how Sara said she was walking the Camino to quit smoking and then confessed to Martin Sheen's character that she was tormented over aborting her only child? You'll find stories like that one here on the Camino every day, all you have to do is open yourself to encounters with the people you meet. Let me give you two examples.

Last night, I sat with a 38-year-old woman from Canada, "Carrie." I asked her why she was here, and she answered, "To challenge myself mentally, physically, and I thought the food would be better." Pretty secular answer, huh? She talked about the rampant drug use among younger people on the Camino. I talked a bit about my conversion to the Catholic Church in a way that was anything but pushy: this is just what has happened to me in the past five years. She began to ask a few questions. Then she told me about her experience caring for her father in a Catholic palliative care facility for his last six months, about the nuns who came to speak with him, how her father pretended to sleep when the nuns came in, and finally how Carrie, though not raised Catholic, took a medal of the Blessed Virgin from the nuns one day and still wears it. She pulled it out from under her tee-shirt to show me, and it matched my own.

Just before dinner, Carrie confessed to me that she was impressed by friends who had received what she called "signs," verification of their faith. She said she hungers for signs, but is afraid to open herself. I told her about my friend André, whom I met in Navarette, a Catholic who said to me, "The Camino will change you. All you have to do is empty yourself." Then we went in to dinner. Whether I even see Carrie again, the Camino will determine.

This morning I walked for over six hours with the bicycle-crazy French grandfather, "Jean-Paul." We talked about everything under the sun (of which there was a plentiful supply). Because I am unafraid to talk about my faith experiences, I mentioned early on that I am a convert of four years' standing and shared some other facts surrounding my life in the Church today. The conversation, all in French, moved on to many other things. Then, about five hours after we met, and after a long silence, he began, "Si ce n'est pas indiscret—" (If I'm not being indiscrete—). Then he asked what it was that had triggered my conversion. He said that he himself had been raised Catholic, educated in Catholic schools including a very strict Jesuit lycée. Then he had then fallen away from the church for over 50 years. But now in his 70s, he finds himself opening up again to the faith of his youth, and wondering just how much baby he threw out with the Catholic bath water.

I answered, in a phrase, that my conversion had been triggered by "les papes and les saints," the popes and the saints. Then I explained for 10 minutes, again not evangelizing as such but simply sharing my experiences. He listened. I asked if I had explained clearly. He said yes, but said no more on the subject. When we checked into our hostel, where we have beds across from one another, I noticed that he made a long journal entry before taking a nap. Did he write about his faith, or about his encounter with an American Catholic this morning? I'll never ask. I'll never know.

But I do know that tomorrow the Camino is likely to offer me another opportunity to talk with someone who says they're here for one reason, but has a deeper hunger burning in their hearts. And I will talk with them.

American Catholics: it's the Camino calling. Pick up the phone.

Intellectuals, Certain Ones Only

Not until I had finished Intellectuals by historian Paul Johnson (right, in the photo) did I learn that he is Catholic. This does not surprise me; rather, it gratifies me. I admire Johnson even more now that I know. My friend M., who recently began attending our School of Community, alerted me to Intellectuals. As a token of friendship, I picked up the book and started reading. Intellectuals has shifted my world-view more than any single book since My Life with the Saints by Fr. James Martin, which triggered my decision to turn Catholic three and a half years ago. I wonder if the Jesuit Father Jim would not be appalled by my interest in brother Paul.

Just One Thing, God

When I was a sophomore in high school, I used to talk with God. Beg or bargain with God might be more like it.

My life was a charm. I had it all: great school, good student, decent athlete, nice friends. There was only one thing wrong with my life: death.

I used to ask God to solve this one problem of death, and—I don’t remember what I promised in return. I had pretty much left active worship in the church-going sense. I was a lapsed Episcopalian then, still 40 years from the Catholic Church. Be that as it may, I was as aware as I’ve ever been in my life that death would happen to me.

And I had no solution.

The Lord: Chapter 79, “The Lamb”

Dear friend,

In a mosque you won’t see pictures of God. But Christianity “runs the danger of scandal,” Romano Guardini writes. Christianity says that God “became flesh.” Its saints and artists have represented God with imagery for two thousand years.

No image of God is stranger to me than that of Jesus in Revelation: the lamb. (Note the lamb at the base of the cross in this image by Matthias Grünewald, cited by Guardini.) A weak, humble, albeit warm and friendly creature, what is the lamb doing as a central symbol of God made man in Christian life?

That’s what RG asks in this chapter.

A Dizzy, Disney Day in Venice

We were told that today, our first full day in Venice, would be special because it is the feast of St. Mark, patron of the city. I expected maybe religious processions like those seen in Boston's North End, or maybe at least a bit of organized civic folderol. Instead, all we got was crowds. At mid-morning Katie shared a factoid she had read somewhere or other: that Venice has so many more visitors than inhabitants that someday they think they may have to start charging admission to the city itself. Like turning it into Disney Italia at the head of the Adriatic.

We have an apartment in the Cannaregio neighborhood on the north side of the Grand Canal, and just down a narrow alley and around a corner is the Church of St. Mary of Miracles, Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Having taken in the Basilica of Sts. John and Paul last evening, I figured it was time for a smaller-scale church. I stepped inside the door and ran into a ticket booth. With Katie by my side, I paused to look around. "You can't stand here!" the lady inside the booth said, somehow knowing that I was an American. "But this is a church!" I protested. "Three euros," she replied. "You can't stand there."

As I turned annoyed toward the exit, a German woman who thought she was being funny said something about the cost of hell being greater. I didn't think that was funny at all.

We soon discovered that for ten euros you can buy a ticket to seventeen churches, most of which I gather have been transformed from churches into museums for all the Tintorettos and Tiepolos that are hanging in these over-architected palaces of ancient faith and Renaissance civic pride. So we got ourselves a pair of tickets and set off in search of churches. Katie agreed to accompany me to the first two, after which she would split off to visit the Academy of Art and I would continue on my Camino of Chiesas. I know that that phrase combines three languages, but I don't care. Today, just to survive, I used every available scrap of English (fluent), French (semi-fluent), German (smattering of high-school phrases filtering randomly into my head), and Italian (clueless) just to get by.

First stop was Santa Maria del Giglio, although it took some time getting there because I persisted in asking Italians for directions to Santa Maria dei Julio. Like I say, clueless. The origins of Saint Mary of the Lily, as I think it should be translated, can be traced to the tenth century, but the final design was completed in 1680, seven hundred years later! Its façade is nothing less than a grand funeral monument to one Antonio Barbaro and his family, thanks to Tony's bequest of 30,000 ducats to the builders of the church—kind of like buying a permanent billboard inside Fenway Park. Yet with the church itself hangs an extraordinarily moving painting of Virgin and Child with an infant John the Baptist, by Peter Paul Rubens. No one mixes God and mammon like the Venetians.

Next up was the church of Santo Stefano, dedicated to the first martyr, St. Stephen. Here I sat for ten minutes gazing at a massive Last Supper painted by Tintoretto and his school.

After bidding Katie Adio, I headed to the waterfront and Santa Maria del Rosario (of the Rosary). Originally a small church built by a lay brotherhood, the Gesuati, in the late fifteenth century, it was taken over by the Dominicans after Pope Clement IX suppressed the Gesuati in 1668. Rebuilt on a far larger scale in the eighteenth century, the new church has an interior unity of design that shows the firm grip of the Order of Preachers. Three extraordinary frescos on the ceiling show key episodes in the life of St. Dominic: the Apparition of the Virgin to the Saint, the Institution of the Rosary (favored by the Dominicans and elevated in status by Pope Clement XI in 1714), and the Glory of St. Dominic (a flight of angels conducting him to eternal beatitude).

Just when I thought that should be enough for one church, I discovered the painting in the first chapel on the right: Tiepolo's "The Virgin appears to Saints Rose of Lima, Catherine of Siena, and Agnes of Montepulciano," all three of them Dominicans. Because my post-illustrating abilities are sorely limited on the iPad I am using for the trip, I suggest you Google this painting. It is impressive.

I was tired and soon got lost looking for church #4 on my list. In doing so, I stumbled into a church that is not on the list—and had the most beautiful experience of the day. Entering the Church of the Archangel Raphael, I heard what seemed to be a heavenly choir. Founded in the sixth century (!) and rebuilt many times, the final design was achieved in 1618. After a fire burnt the façade and the organ with it, a new organ was installed in 1749. In 1821 the brothers Antonio and Agostino Callido built the current organ, and it was this heavenly instrument that greeted my ears. An organist was playing a slow hymn in a minor key, and as I sat in silence, my heart rose and fell with the meldoy. I wanted it to last forever.

After about ten minutes, the piece ended and silence fell. The organist came down from the loft and passed me. I chased him to the exit, to find out the name of the piece. I asked in English and French, he answered in Italian and German. As a result, he never understood my question and I never got my answer. We did exchange smiles over our sincere though failed efforts to communicate.

But the afternoon had been transformed. I quickly found the listed church of Saint Sebastian nearby, then began to work my way back by a new path toward our apartment. Half in dream, I passed by an outdoor café in the Campo de S. Barnaba. I heard a familiar voice in a familiar Boston accent. "We have what we call vacation rules," the voice siad. "You get to do exactly what you want, so I went to the Academy, and he has been visiting churches."

It was Katie, of course, who had made fast friends with a German couple. I sat and reminded my wife that I had predicted earlier in the day that we were going to run into someone we knew today. I just hadn't realized that we would run into each other.