Should I ever go to Italy again, I'd work harder at taking really fine pictures. This time I had the jitters. I wasn't a bit nervous; but, for the most part, when you take a first step into a place like the Basilica di Santa Marco, you lose your wits, you're not in your right mind because you simply can't believe what you're seeing. Right then, taking aim with a camera at anything distracts you from seeing, well, "everything," which, of course, you can't see, which doesn't mean you stop trying. Next time, I'd like to walk in soberly and not be blown away.
I'd like to be able to aim carefully, balance lines, watch light closely, and look for dramatic frames. I'd like to think about what I'm doing, about how to capture what's humanly possible of all the beauty and get it into the little black box bobbing around my neck. I'd like to think about pictures when my head isn't spinning.
There's no accounting for taste,, but almost right away I told myself that the snapshot above was going to be among the finest compositions of the dozens of pictures I took. I'd like to say what's here was planned, but it wasn't. It was snapped, on my phone (I hadn't brought the camera!). It's an image I liked because of the almost divine play of light. I don't remember anything about the specific chapel--it's to the right of the nave--but when I stood there and looked at what I'd shot, I loved it. It looked really good.
The spires point your way up toward the dome, where light is breaking. That contrast won't let your eyes not look; it demands your attention. Let me speak plainly--I think this is a gorgeous picture: the aspiration of its lines deliver at least something of the grandeur of the whole place. Of the shots I took in Italian cathedrals, this one does most to convince the viewer the place is as overwhelmingly beautiful as you say it is.
It took a lot of lifetime for me to come to believe that at the very core of spirituality of all kinds, including the spirituality of Christianity, which is my profession, is sheer awe. To paraphrase Calvin (which seems almost sacrilegious in St. Mark's), only when we see God in the world outside or beyond us do we begin to recognize how great he is and needy we are. I've taken hundreds of prairie landscapes, trying to capture just a bit, a taste, of early morning glory, a stunning fragment of what Calvin is talking about.
Oddly enough, here in the Basilica, I was a thousand miles from that kind of landscape, a world away from a mountain lake or a chorus of burnished October hardwoods. That I'm almost forever away from those things doesn't mean I'm not feeling something in me that's as delightful as it is familiar--sheer awe. In the Basilica di Santa Marco, Venice, Italy, I can't shoot pictures because what's there makes my head spin.
And then, right there, a fancy little gold sign adorns the gate.
This is a tighter shot, more angle, more spires; but there's some Latin on that sign on the gate: "Venite Adoremus," it says.
Somehow, for some reason, I found that shocking in its homely familiarity because I hear those very words play in a thousand renditions of a old Christmas carol I've sung just about every last Christmas of my life. I'm standing there bathed in the awe created by the most beautiful cathedral in Venice, Italy, and I don't really have a clue what those words means; what I do recognize is that I know those words, and I actually hear them in the record of my own life.
Venite Adoremus.
So much of what you witness in Italy's vast treasures--its paintings, its sculptures, its architecture--is so exalted that it renders you not only speechless but selfless. But then, selflessness is a good place to be, or so real spiritualists of every cloth maintain.
Those two words adorning a gate to a side chapel of St. Mark's Basilica, now nameless in my memory, brought music to my ears and to my soul, familiar and beloved music that's a part of me and a part of who I have been for lo, these three score and ten. That golden emblem message brought me home, allowed me to share--and not just as a tourist--the beauty all around.
"Venite Adoremus"--come, let us worship.
"O come, let us adore him."
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