chocolate & churches
This morning I counted 45 pictures in my camera roll of different cathedrals, churches and mosques we have visited thus far, and we’re about 36 days in.
Yesterday we had free time and I noticed that more than half our group ended up in the same church. By choice, we all chose to go to more churches even though we had seen multiple churches that morning.
This got me thinking, did we all go to the church because we wanted to or because we are on a study abroad seeking the sacred? My friends had some good thoughts about this that I liked.
One of them said that for him the initial sense of awe that he felt in the first beautiful churches we saw has now faded and the churches have started looking the same to him. But he does appreciate them as places of thinking and quiet.
Another friend said that she went through a phase of amazement and then a phase of trying to find all the different aspects of the churches to identify which denomination it is from, and now she feels like she’s getting burnt out of the excitement of the churches and ready for a change or scenery. But she also mentioned that she loves the way the churches can be a place of meditation and stillness.
That’s something I have noticed, when we enter a church or a cathedral, there are people of many different faiths gathered here but it becomes a place of reflection and mediation for many walks of life.
When we went to the Duomo today, the tour guide said that there used to be doors on the short sides of the church where people could enter and exit so they wouldn’t have to go around the whole Cathedral. But what ended up happening is that people would see going through this sacred space as just a route to cut down their commute time.
This got me thinking, when we are having sacred encounters frequently, how do we keep them from becoming commonplace? Can there be too much of a good thing?
My friend Ella adores chocolate. Her favorite snack at home is to eat chocolate chips by the handful. She goes through a bag in three days. For the first month of the trip she would eat Nutella for breakfast every single morning with chocolate bars throughout the day. She started to think she had a chocolate addiction.
You can imagine my surprise when we were having this conversation about churches and she said she feels the same way about chocolate sometimes— when you have it all the time you may not appreciate it as much.
And I think it’s okay to have times when you feel tired. Maybe a little burnt out or chocolate overloaded. Perhaps you’ll feel a little guilty because you know the churches are incredibly beautiful and you’re in Italy and feel like you should appreciate them more.
I have seen this pattern in my own faith. I try to be consistent in the way that I live what I believe, but there definitely are times when it’s going to the temple feels repetitive, prayers don’t connect and scripture study goes through the motions.
But just like how we have gone through phases of our appreciation for churches and chocolate, the level of appreciation and passion for our faith may fluctuate. At first I was worried that something was wrong with me and I had lost the passion for the beautiful sites I was seeing, but then I realized that my perspective had deepened. Rather than focusing on the beauty of the buildings, I realized I was focusing more on what I felt there and what the spirit may be teaching me. I’m seeking more for the light.
It may be the same way with our faith. Maybe when you feel a lack of passion, your faith is actually deepening and becoming more peaceful.
Written later: since thinking about this more later, I realized that what makes a place sacred for me is connection. The connection I feel to God there, or to the humans I am with. The churches I remember the most are the ones where I felt the Spirit very strongly through a conversation I had with one of my friends or with God.
