Angels & Laundry
It was just me and this older man in a chapel yesterday.
I went to visit the Padre Pio Shrine, a place that I tell clients and friends about all the time. I learned about this place from a woman who was instrumental in my own spiritual growth. I don’t think you need to be Catholic or be Christian to go there and feel something pretty powerful. The grounds are beautiful and quiet, there are people walking around in silent prayer outside, and there are people pouring their souls into prayers of devotion or prayers of desperation. That there’s a place for people to go to do either means humanity isn’t the dumpster fire we sometimes perceive it to be.
The little chapel inside this shrine has yellow walls, colorful statues of saints and Jesus and Mary. Some of the paintings are beautiful and some of them look like they belong inside the Denver Airport (if that reference doesn’t land, see HERE). When I walked in I expected to be alone. I hoped I would be anyway. Instead, there was an older man with a hat pulled down past his ears sitting in his coat staring at the altar just talking. To whom, I could not say.
I must have slipped in quietly or he must have lost his hearing because my wooden clog shoes kicked into about three different wooden things- the pew, the kneeler, the underside of the kneeler- and the sound carried through the space in ways that would make the second grade nun at my old catholic school hand out sentences to for copy like my eternal soul’s salvation depended on it.
Write, “I will not make noises in church,” 500 times.
I sat down after making a racket and looked around. My purpose for driving all the way there had suddenly slipped my mind and I wasn’t sure what it was I should be doing. No one was leading the show, no one was singing, no dead body was being rolled down the aisle; I wasn’t used to being in church without the ring leader or a corpse. But the old man in the pew a few rows in front of me, sitting upright like he’s talking to a friend across a booth in a diner, just kept talking. Not in any way that indicated he was desperate for answers and not in any way that indicated he was lost in a moment of divine connection.
It was hard to make out his words but he wasn’t exactly quiet. His head would tilt to the left, look down, tilt up again. He would pause for a time and then suddenly resume like he was listening to someone and waiting for them to stop talking for him to respond. Sitting a few rows behind him, I noticed that I sat directly under this low hanging ceiling while he sat under an open ceiling that was bright and airy. It was kind of shaded where I sat and I regretted my seat choice but decided I was too embarrassed to move, after all, it wasn’t like there was a “best seat in the house.”
When in Rome, I do know how to do like they do. I knelt and did the sign of the cross and started listing off my “asks.”
Healthy and happy kids, healthy and happy family, healthy and happy me. Money would be nice, but I don’t need to win the lottery or anything. I’m willing to work for it, you know? A little patience and forgiveness for others, for myself. A definitive ruling on the safety of ozempic and other GLP-1’s or a little more willpower. Hmmm… Maybe can I talk to my dad while he’s up there somewhere? Like, can you arrange a postcard or something? Finally, can you make the alien stuff just stop for a bit? A global pandemic this decade was really more than enough.
I ran out of things to say in my brain at some point and realized I was searching. Reaching in that way you do when you think you have to get it all out while you can before your turn is up. Nothing was coming so I did what we were taught not to do in catholic school which is the half-kneel (butt on edge of seat while kneeling). The confessional where this shrine’s namesake once sat bleeding from his hands and his feet and his side was a few feet from me. I stared at it for a long while. Padre Pio would hear confession while in agony from the wounds he developed and tended to his whole life, wounds that were supposedly a miraculous gift from God. This little structure, the confessional, was taken from the monastery he spent his life in in Italy and brought here to the part of PA that time largely ignores. This spindley, wooden cage was displayed just feet from me and as I stared, I couldn’t help thinking, humans are so strange. Here’s this guy bleeding everywhere sitting in a cage so people can tell him all the bad stuff they did in hopes that they could get to heaven.
Fast forward 60 years here I am, staring at it, wondering if I can do a last minute addition to the list of asks and toss a vacation in there.
Why did I feel the need to drive an hour to be here? I wasn’t lost (at the moment), I wasn’t sad or fearful, I wasn’t even particularly moved to connect with this part of my spirituality or faith. It was kind of like the times when I decide I've got some time on my hands and I should see what HomeGoods has new. A spur of the moment non-event. A Scooby-Doo style trance.
I just found myself here.
Admittedly, boredom crept in and my butt started to hurt from the half-kneel. I shuffled a bit and sat back all the way and used my foot to lift the kneeler back up and made another bang by overshooting my leg extension with my wooden clogs and made a wood on wood clack that echoed in the chapel. The only other person in the chapel was still the old guy rattling off his hoagie order to the great sandwich artist in the sky and he suddenly sat up and turned around in response to the latest sound. Maybe he wasn’t deaf after all.
He was a gentle looking guy. An unremarkable looking guy, really. Probably a widow, I thought, probably living alone, probably hoping to hear from his son sometime soon. It could have all been true or just a flicker of pattern recognition in my brain; I suppose it doesn’t matter though. What does matter is that he twisted himself as far around as possible to look directly at me. Face to face, eye to eye, just a few rows between us.
And for a second or two he just looked at me.
In regular life I have this habit of talking to anyone, anywhere. If an old person looks at me I will go out of my way to engage them in conversation and do my best to give them a reason to smile. It’s always felt like a thing I was meant to do and I happily do it whenever I can. But, in this moment I was all but frozen in the empty chapel next to the confessional of a venerated saint, in the dark section of the room where the light did not hit.
I stared back for a moment.
Like the Scooby Doo trance was still in effect, without thinking, I lifted my palm parallel to my ears and I waived at him.
He smiled wide and waved back.
Then he turned back to the altar and laughed. Within a few seconds he stood up and walked out without looking at me and I was left completely alone in the chapel.
A few moments later, I stood up and walked out to my car, pondering the experience and wondering if I had spotted an angel on a pew in the middle of nowhere, PA or if I had simply been so desperate to avoid a day of family cleaning that I fled by minivan to escape. And if it's both, does that mean I should skip family cleaning day more often?