Lessons from the Garden
Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)
My journey into the Roman Catholic faith began in Rome a long time ago. I was a 20-year-old college student, in Europe for the first time in the summer of 1968. I took the overnight train from Paris, found a room in a small pensione, and began wandering.
At Ponte Sant’Angelo I crossed the Tiber. (As a Methodist kid from Ohio, I did not then know that expression of Catholic conversion.) I turned west to the Piazza Pia and shortly came to the Via della Conciliazione and glanced to the right to see St. Peter’s.
That was not the moment I decided to enter the Catholic Church, but I did enter the basilica. Inside, I turned right and saw Michelangelo’s Pietà. This was four years before a Hungarian kook named Laszlo Toth took a geologist’s hammer to the sculpture, specifically to Our Lady’s nose. I found the Pietà beautiful, luminously so. But I found the interior of the basilica overwhelming and, frankly, garish. After all, I was a Methodist.
