Eat, Pray, Love

“See, Liz?” she says, “See how they just slapped that nineteenth-century façade over that
brickwork? I bet if we turn the corner we’ll find... yes!... see, they did use the original Ro-
man monoliths as supporting beams, probably because they didn’t have the manpower to
move them... yes, I quite like the jumble-sale quality of this basilica... .”
Catherine carries the map and her Michelin Green Guide, and I carry our picnic lunch (two
of those big softball-sized rolls of bread, spicy sausage, pickled sardines wrapped around
meaty green olives, a mushroom pâté that tastes like a forest, balls of smoked mozzarella,
peppered and grilled arugula, cherry tomatoes, pecorino cheese, mineral water and a split of
cold white wine), and while I wonder when we’re going to eat, she wonders aloud, “Why don’t
people talk more about the Council of Trent?”
She takes me into dozens of churches in Rome, and I can’t keep them straight—St. This
and St. That, and St. Somebody of the Barefoot Penitents of Righteous Misery... but just be-
cause I cannot remember the names or details of all these buttresses and cornices is not to
say that I do not love to be inside these places with my sister, whose cobalt eyes miss noth-
ing. I don’t remember the name of the church that had those frescoes that looked so much
like American WPA New Deal heroic murals, but I do remember Catherine pointing them out
to me and saying, “You gotta love those Franklin Roosevelt popes up there.. .” I also remem-
ber the morning we woke early and went to mass at St. Susanna, and held each other’s
hands as we listened to the nuns there chanting their daybreak Gregorian hymns, both of us
in tears from the echoing haunt of their prayers. My sister is not a religious person. Nobody in
my family really is. (I’ve taken to calling myself the “white sheep” of the family.) My spiritual in-
vestigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. “I think that kind of
faith is so beautiful,” she whispers to me in the church, “but I can’t do it, I just can’t.. .”
Here’s another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister’s neigh-
borhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her
three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could
only say, shocked, “Dear God, that family needs grace.” She replied firmly, “That family needs
casseroles,” and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family
dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recog-
nizes that this is grace.
We walk out of St. Susanna, and she says, “Do you know why the popes needed city
planning in the Middle Ages? Because basically you had two million Catholic pilgrims a year
coming from all over the Western World to make that walk from the Vatican to St. John Later-
an—sometimes on their knees—and you had to have amenities for those people.”
My sister’s faith is in learning. Her sacred text is the Oxford English Dictionary. As she
bows her head in study, fingers speeding across the pages, she is with her God. I see my sis-