I caught him thumb-sized from his window

Peregrine Notes by Alegria A.Imperial

But I can’t claim the small miracle for myself alone. Hundreds or maybe thousands, including those outside of Vatican Square—packed almost breath-upon-breath of each other, eyes raised to the sky against which his apartment building rose above the colonnade—received the gift of his voice, and from his raised hands, when he made the Sign of the Cross, his blessing.

Missing the one day when Pope Francis, as per his schedule, could receive guests and pilgrims, my friend and I had not expected what we had thought a surprise; but not so, for mostly South American pilgrims, religious organizations that arrived on giant tour buses, and regulars on the last Sunday of the month. No wonder, in the line we got to at its tail, groups bearing banners seemed certain Il Papa would see them, and they, him, while we aimed only at Holy Mass inside St. Peter’s and see the Pieta up close.

Eleanor and I landed in Eternal Rome at midnight in the spring last year, so like a dream. Later walking toward Citta del Vaticano nine minutes away from Prati B&B at Degli di Scipiano, where we stayed, we seemed to float on streets perfumed by wisteria streaming from balconies, through fashion boutiques, trattoria and garden shops. With driving à la Manila, we had dodged zooming cars as we crossed wide boulevards and, soon, Rome’s gold-ish sun ushered us into Vatican Square, by then packed with hundreds of herded tourists and pilgrims.

So awed with our necks craned to heights scaled to eternity as in those childhood estampitas, we fell into a hush. We had to whirl around to take it all in: the basilica with its balcony from where the Pope emerges at Christmas and Easter on television to greet us in his Urbi et Orbi (to the city and to the world), its dome and the colonnade, the marble figures of Christ, the apostles and saints we know by heart poised in the wind—where we stood, a Roman necropolis in Nero’s time, early Christians had been executed by him, Saint Peter among those crucified.

Inside the basilica, overwhelmed by the magnificence but especially a touching-distance to the Cathedra Petri, Saint Peter’s papal chair, behind the baldachin, I resisted blinking. “Filipino? Yes, a Holy Mass will begin in a few minutes,” the usher let us into a girded area facing the high altar, pulling us away from the thick flow of just-gawking crowds. “Dominus vobiscum” reverberated through the sung Mass concelebrated by about a dozen cardinals; Eleanor and I responded from memory, “Et cum espiritu tuo,” even singing, “Pater Noster” and “Agnus Dei,” feeling transported to the many candle-lit Misa Cantada on Holy Week in dark brick churches of our youth.

The burning of incense, which had seemed to suffuse the deepest concaves of the basilica regressed me deeper to Semana Santa with Inay, my mother’s mom, wearing her best black terno and mantilla, which she did only on Good Friday. Soon, an onrush of images from rites that had given meaning to prayers I once lost but regained in adulthood inundated me—the peal of church bells rung by a granduncle, once a scholar but infected by a nerve disease that turned him monster-looking, the trudge with my mother to Holy Thursday procession of the Eucharist in the bat-ridden baroque parish of St. Andrew, where my sister and I had been baptized, Resurrection Sundays, when little girls dressed as angels threw petals to the Sorrowful Mother, singing in cherubic voices, Alleluia, Letare, that pitched to a climax, when the soloist, picked and raised her veil, while a few feet away on a hefty acacia branch, Judas Escariot dangled for burning.

Brought back to the Square by a gushing stream after Holy Mass, we plunged unknowingly into an expectant wave, crying out for “Papa Francesco!” Soon, from a window high above the colonnade, he addressed us, straining body-to-body to catch him, thumb-size from the ground. But suffused with his discernible smile, his warmth, relived in me how so deeply touched I cried on first seeing more up close, then Pope John Paul II, so long ago it seems, as his open carriage wheeled through Ramon Magsaysay Boulevard in Manila.

And yet, “beyond human dimension,” my non-Catholic friends to whom I have often felt defensive, characterizes our faith, leaving me dumbfounded, when queried on “how I can really live its overwhelming history.” But I now have the answer after what could be Epiphanies from these: first, gazing at the Pieta from a protective glass, which from films and photographs taken close-up I had long thought soaring in size, isn’t, and instead, so like us; second, at Vatican Square, lost in a giant wave that rose up to that window for Il Papa Francesco, girded with and buoyed up by 2,000 years of history, though weighed down by relics and our realities, I finally understood how, like a tiny mustard seed, we can.

Alegria Albano-Imperial, now an internationally published and awarded poet of haiku and other Japanese short poetry forms, writes from Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has immigrated. She left behind an established career in journalism, including public relations and development communications in education, government, and arts and culture, in the Philippines. She was married to the late Felix N Imperial, II, restoration architect.