#evening prayer
One of mine - an excerpt from Rome Vignettes I wrote when I visited the city for the first time.
Vespers:
The Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls is ancient: 3rd CE. It has been much modified yet it still retains the essential aspects of a properly Roman basilica – an apsidal space with an impressive four aisles, and transepts.
It is fronted by a portico’d garden and has adjacent cloisters for the monks who originally resided here.
As a space, I found it awesome: more affecting even than St Peter’s. Perhaps the timing was instrumental –
I went in the late evening: there were very few people inside, the lighting was subdued, the interior mosaics hinted at glory, the cavernous, architecturally austere and regular space dwarfed me. As I drank in the details, there were signs that something was afoot but I was more concerned to descend the well that sits immediately in front of the baldachin’d Papal altar, and see Paul’s tomb. His sarcophagus sits, visible, behind a window’d recess.
As I returned to the nave, and looked past the great baldachino, I could see lights ablaze in the apse. A file of Benedictine monks had assembled for evening prayer, One of their number was seated at a little pipe organ to underpin the plainsong. The rest of the basilica was dark. The columns in the nave were casting strong shadows. The alabaster windows were opaque and dull, save in the west. The space was subdued. The atmosphere was compelling.
We were few in number – maybe a dozen monks and a dozen of us. The liturgy was a sung Vespers in the vernacular, with two young cantors to lead the responses. It was odd, being there. Twenty-two years since I left the friars. Any sort of a service is a bit disconcerting for an atheist, more so when it reaches into places at once familiar and distant. Vespers, in a papal basilica, atop the tomb of St Paul, with Benedictine monks, scores kind of highly on the things to discombobulate Damian scale. But, essentially, it was alright. It’s not my stuff anymore but I’m alert to life’s complexities, to my own complexities, and human aspirations are not inaccessible to atheists! Sung vespers vocalises that as effectively as anything else might. Vespers doesn’t change its format of introit, hymn, psalms, readings, magnificat, intercessions, pater noster and dismissal. I could follow things happily enough and join in some responses. I even remembered the pater noster – words and melody. For 40 minutes, I was simultaneously disconcerted, soothed, elevated and affirmed.
When I left the basilica it was properly dark. Too late to access the portico and cloister, too dark to get any properly good photos of the exterior. But there was a still, small light I took away with me.
I couldn’t have planned, intended or effected a better, more serendipitous, way to pass my last evening in the city.
