Christmas in Assisi

Weekly Notes

Yesterday, my family and our wonderful pilgrims left one of my favorite places on earth. There is no time right now to write an essay telling you about why I love it so much, so instead, I’m going to share something I wrote many years ago, after spending an enchanted Christmas in these beautiful Umbrian hills. It’s about a concept I’ve mused on often here, and ended up becoming the theme of this pilgrimage, so that made it seem doubly appropriate to share here.

We continue to pray for all you as move from church to church Rome. Please continue to pray for us!

P.S. This newsletter is free for everyone thanks to all my full subscribers, whose support makes everything I write and share here possible. If you’re interested in supporting faithful Catholic writing that goes beyond soundbites, please consider upgrading your subscription today.

It is 6:00 p.m. on December 25. The smell of holy things is all around me. Incense and melting wax mingle with the scent of rain, which drifts in through the ever opening and closing doors of the basilica. From the main nave come the sounds of worship: Choir and priest together chant the liturgy of Christmas Day. I don’t understand their song: My Italian is very bad. But, from the seclusion of the little side chapel where I have tucked myself away for this hour, I join my prayers to theirs.

I am not alone. While I kneel beneath the gaze of a cruciform Christ, dozens of pilgrims shuffle by, murmuring words of hope and thanks to the Abiding Presence beneath the Cross. Hundreds more stand behind the gray stone wall that separates apse from nave, uniting their offering with His in ancient words of petition and praise.

I crossed an ocean in winter to whisper those same words here, those words and words of my own. Wrapped in the hush of prayer that fills this Gothic house of Francis, lingers the hint of longings heard and the promise of petitions readily received. There is unarticulated assurance in these stones that desires spoken here travel with greater haste to the One to whom we speak. That is the way with all thin places, and this indeed is a thin place.

“Thin place”—words first given to me five years before as I sat by the fireside of a farmhouse in Wales. My companion was a Protestant minister, formerly of the fundamentalist persuasion, softened by the stumblings of his wild children and frequent conversations with Mercy under the Welsh moonlight. His daughter once lived with me and an octet of other girls in a house by the Chesapeake Bay. I made my first trip across the ocean to visit her, and blessedly found him, a salty, sensitive old soul striving to reconcile memorized formulas with experienced Grace. That night we talked about the loveliness of their land and the peace that blanketed its green hills and valleys. He told me of local legends and Welsh fairy tales, then he named the peace.

“This is what the Welsh call a thin place,” he said to me.

“A thin place, “he continued, “is where the veil between time and eternity has been worn thin, usually by many prayers over many years, but sometimes in an instant, with a blinding flash of grace. No matter. Regardless it becomes easier to talk with God there. You feel closer to him and closer to heaven.”

Now, five years later, I know I have found another thin place, a place made thin by the mad man of Assisi, a gentle lady named Clare, and all the simple souls who journeyed up a craggy path in the Umbrian countryside to lay their petitions at Love’s altar.

Here, in this spot, one man and one woman saw through the mist of time separating finite from infinite. They saw, bubbling beneath the surface of the ordinary and everyday, something extraordinary. They saw Grace Incarnate.  They also saw the passion, terrible in its tenderness and tenacity, which sustains creation, and they saw the story of One telling itself over and over again in the story of all. They saw that, and they responded in the wildest of ways, leaving everything to follow, adore, and preach that story.

It was that utterly complete, utterly obedient, utterly loving response that hallowed this city on a hill. Just as God permits matter—the waters of baptism, the bread of the Eucharist, the bodies of husband and wife—to become channels through which his grace rushes into a battered world, so too it seems did he permit Francis and Clare to become channels through which his grace rushed into matter itself, into the dirt and stones of Assisi. He let their passion illuminate their corner of the world, transforming it into a sanctuary where others could find a moment’s rest in His embrace.

My knees are sore, and my hands are cold. I sit back and reach for gloves. But my eyes stay fixed on loving arms stretched wide by hate. To hide myself in them is joy and peace. It is also terror. It is to allow my body to be wracked by grace, to become, like Francis and Clare, a breathing, shouting, dancing, laughing, crying, aching conduit of Him. It is to accept the blessing and task given to the nameless saints whose prayers linger in the peace of the Welsh countryside and to the martyrs whose blood hallowed the streets of Rome. It is to accept the call to make my own corner of creation, my home, a thin place.

While wars rage and elections pend, while pundits rant and theologians fret, while boys bleed and unborn babies’ hearts beat their last, that Man on the Cross asks me to hallow walls and sanctify floors. He asks of my little soul the little things—to love fiercely, to sacrifice merrily, to trust wholly. Through grace, he expects me to become a grace. He calls me to die to myself in every hour of every day, becoming more perfectly and beautifully myself in every death. And through that seemingly ceaseless cycle of death and resurrection, he seeks to pour himself into the wounds, great and small, that fill my corner of the world, drawing all whom I touch that much nearer to grace, that much nearer to Him. He wants nothing less than for me to be a kind of sacrament.

He wants nothing less for each one of his precious, exquisite, beloved creations.

He wants nothing less for each one of us.

The prosaic rumbling of an empty stomach calls me back. I glance at my watch. Friends and a Christmas dinner wait a mile away. I rise, then drop once more on bended knee, sealing myself with the sign of suffering love.

As I leave the sounds of prayer behind and wend my way through dark and narrow streets, one question hounds my footsteps: What kind of wonderful and terrible call is this?

What kind of wonderful and terrible call is this?

Can I ask you a favor? If you enjoyed this newletter and the other writing I do here, would you mind sharing it with others? With me out of the country and away from social media for most of the summer, I could really use some help spreading the word about this newsletter. You sharing it on social media or even just emailing it to friends and family is a huge help. Thank you!

In Case You Missed It

The Devil and All His Works: (Full Subscribers Only)

The Deep Work of Homemaking (Free for All Subscribers)

Misguided Hope, Questionable Television, and Harry Potter (Free for All Subscribers)