This past March, I traveled to Rome to accept an award for my recently published novel, The Accidental Jesus. The event would cap this year’s international competition for literary fiction sponsored by the Pegasus Foundation.

The book is set in San Pedro, California, and dramatizes how the protagonist—who resembles the historical Jesus and struggles with his Catholic faith—is taken for Jesus himself when he returns to his hometown for a high school reunion. This turn of events brings to mind the human Jesus and how he lived his life—a model that dominates the place of mere biblical authority and is given credence in the pronouncements and writings of Pope John the 23rd, Pope John Paul II, and the recently deceased Pope Francis (to whom my book is dedicated). Clearly, the Vatican area of Rome was the natural place to alight.

I landed in the San Pietro community, close to St. Peter’s Basilica, and stayed at the San Pietro Hotel. Having passed through this marvelous city before, I was well familiar with its wealth of tourist sites so I chose to focus instead on the people and culture during my relatively short stay. My first foray into St. Peter’s community came just after I managed to modulate my jet lag with a serious snooze. I set out to discover the location of the site for the ceremony: Teatro Ghione. I knew it was pretty close, having targeted it on my map. Unfortunately, this was little help. For starters, there were two streets with almost the same name. I picked one of them but it soon curved into another street so I reversed course back to the starting point. From there, I took option two. Once I did, things went smoothly. I followed the street for a few blocks but couldn’t find the address. The numbers indicated that it was close, but again the street curved off sharply and I couldn’t find a name or street sign for this short stretch. At this point, I reversed course again and finally encountered a cluster of police officers schmoozing alongside their vehicles who set me straight.

Now, jet lag and the gridded culture I inherited must’ve been my undoing to some extent, but the explanation by the police was revealing. My first option would’ve gotten me to the theater if I had continued along the street with no (apparent) name. It was a kind of connector between two streets, an interregnum between two spaces, that Romans can easily navigate.

Though I made my ceremony with time to spare, I never did learn to cruise the city’s maze of winding streets comfortably. I even had difficulty processing the airport on exit—Fiumicino Airport is a work of art in itself. Following the predictable gate numbers with no problem, I was quickly detoured through winding paths lined with encrusted boutiques, coffee shops, and paraphernalia stands that wouldn’t end. I panicked, assuming I had taken the wrong fork, and forged my own angle through the maze to another section of the airport and rekindled the journey.

Rome is surely not the only European city with winding streets, but their prevalence there—in recent years, at least—is strikingly Catholic. Pope Clement VIII Corsini, who ruled from 1592 to 1605, was responsible for initiating the construction which led to the street layout we see today (along with the cobblestone surface). This project coincided with the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica, the towering symbol of mature, post-Renaissance Catholicism, begun in 1506 and completed in 1626. It celebrated the Church’s spiritual authority and its artistic and architectural triumphs in response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation’s confirmation of papal power and tradition.

Rome’s serpentine street design was not new, however. It evolved organically during the years of the Roman Republic, a quasi-democratic society that existed for several centuries before the arrival of the authoritarian Caesars in the late first century B.C. (specifically, with the ascension of Emperor Augustus in 27 B.C.). They brought the right-angled, gridded system to their society. It was reimplemented and refined by Emperor Nero after the Great Fire of 64 A.D., when two thirds of the city was destroyed. He attempted to impose order by constructing wider and straighter streets for better access and fire control. This gridding of the city’s remains, however, was far from completed by the demise of the Empire in the 5th century A.D.—476 A.D. is the generally accepted date. One of the biggest barriers was its hilly topography.

The arrival of the Christians put a final check to the ill-fated development of the gridded city as they allowed the maze of narrow, winding streets from the Republic era to be preserved and expanded over time. As permanent fixtures, the churches and temples added to the landscape made this expansion irreversible. One of the first and most famous was erected already in 352 A.D., well before the demise of the Empire. It was Santa Maria Liberiana, rebuilt and renamed over the years. Located on Esquiline Hill, it is currently named Santa Maria Maggiore.

One might say that Rome’s geographical design has been functionally serpentined. I stayed in a community adjacent to the Vatican developed right after WWII. Prior to that it was a sparsely populated rural space with winding paths and narrow cobblestone streets, likely the product of Pope Clement’s makeover. The developers accommodated this configuration and positioned the buildings at varying angles to each other, further reinforcing the serpentine heritage. In addition, they modeled these new structures on the styles of the distant past.

Losing one’s way in a serpentine path is a manifestation of Catholic consciousness. One of the central concepts of Catholicism, referenced in various biblical passages, is that losing oneself is necessary to finding oneself—one’s true self, that is, one modeled on the likeness of Jesus Christ. In Matthew 16: 24-25, Jesus speaks: “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” That is, saving, preserving one’s assumed, tentative identity, living a contented life with no awareness about growth, is tantamount to death. Conversely, losing it is synonymous with life.

This conjures the notion of identity formation in sociology. True self-identity, according to the theory of Symbolic Interactionism, emerges through a trial-and-error process where people adjust their behavior in accord with the feedback they receive from others. This ongoing adjustment advances one’s maturity through ever-more-rewarding trial identities. Those that refuse this journey remain stuck in a form of adolescence. Embracing the possibility of loss, risking mistakes, and being willing to face the unknown assures the seekers who model their life on Jesus Christ that they’ll achieve their true self.

Convoluted and interrupted paths test the mettle of the seekers’ search for identity. The journey through these paths will be filled with temptation and wrong turns, sometimes causing them to stumble into sin. In doing so, they will likely experience guilt and the desire to be tested, wondering if their mistakes will condemn them to oblivion. Uncertainty drives the creation of rituals to modulate the experience, convert loss into purposeful meaning. Hence confession. Feedback from priests along with the community the seekers interact with should adjust their behavior and send them on their journey with a cleansed conscience and a clean slate. Freed from guilt, the seekers will move on to the next test, hopefully with greater insight. Constructive change should be registered from sin to sin, which can force some onto a higher spiritual plane. Some of the greatest sinners have become saints, the guilt piling up from so much pleasureful deviation ultimately flipping the script.

Serpentine paths visualize the curving and winding but also conjure the presence of the serpent, a strong symbol in Catholicism that represents temptation. One of its clearest biblical references is in Revelation 12:9, 20:2. The serpent influences seekers to sin through those spatial journeys of loss before they find themselves. But the serpent has a dual meaning in the Bible—it is also a symbol of healing in John 3: 14-15. The second chance is central to the character of the historical Jesus. Seekers journeying from sin to sin facing temptation and evil, trying to find their way through the serpentine maze to fulfillment in Jesus Christ, adjusting their behaviors accordingly, should unwittingly achieve enlightened success at the end of their quest. Through transformative grace, Catholicism repurposes fallen realities to achieve redemption. Symbols of evil are reoriented toward divine purposes. St. Augustine is one of the most prominent examples of a serious sinner finding Jesus Christ through progressive losses.

My track record at sinning is paltry compared to St. Augustine’s. Being a lapsed Catholic for some time, I lived some distance from the logic of good and evil responsible for the existence of sin. I had serious issues with elements of the doctrine as well. In the final months before the death of Pope John Paul II, I wrote a condensed satire of St. Augustine’s Confessions, sending it to his receptive circle twenty minutes before he passed. (It was refined and republished in Musing the Masses two years ago as “Snookered Calculus.”) You could say I was lost but unaware of being lost, wanting mostly to preserve the life I had accumulated. I did not perceive myself as being in any real danger of losing it, as Jesus prophesied, nor was I capable of suffering a successive series of losses that could set me on a path to finding myself in His likeness.

During my recent visit to Rome, I continued to get lost after that first experience, but the serpentine paths began to capture me. I enjoyed the hiatuses like I was becoming a spirited flaneur. Losing the urge to quickly reach my destination, I’d meander to a cafe for some serious reflection. The Bono Roma was one of my favorite roosts, situated across from the wall which contains the Vatican on Porta Cavalleggeri, not far from the entrance, a thriving hub for locals and tourists from many corners of the globe. The street snakes through the neighborhood, serving as a connector between the Via Gregorio and the Via Urbano VII. We schmoozed in direct view of an oval sculpted into the wall across the street, an eye-shaped concavity through which an errant Swiss Guard, Cardinal, or even God himself could be benevolent observers blessing our interchanges.

Pumped from the conversations, I sprung back into the serpentine maze, my destination now fading from memory as I strolled through the shadow of the wall and into St. Peter’s Square, with its waves of supplicant eyes, beckoning statuary, roving pilgrims appended to their rosaries, an ethnic feast of priests and nuns forming ecstatic unions that drew me toward them. Weakening from the over-stimulation, I meandered toward the Castel Sant’Angelo but took an acute turn across the Tiber before I reached it and found myself in another stretch of winding paths with a ubiquity of steeples, domes, and shrines, the imposing Catholicity finally urging me to reflect about the existence of sin. Like I had exited a swoon, I found myself facing the Pantheon, the still functional temple from Roman times. As if this was my subconscious destination, I pondered what kind of cosmology its breathtaking dome represented. I thought about how this secular, more-than-one-God culture offered an alternative to the constraints of Catholic sin, issues of good and evil and relative morality, envisioning for an extended moment that it presented a possible solution to such thorny questions.

But as I found the serpentine trails back toward Vatican City, I thought more about the culture of the gridded Roman Empire that built the Pantheon, especially its barbarity toward Christians. The execution of roughly 400,000 over the course of four centuries in the Colosseum came to mind, the unspeakable brutality that sustained this authoritarian society. The Catholic church that succeeded the Roman Empire was hardly averse to authoritarianism, and the institution is mired in crises even today. But there’s an extreme contrast between these values and those of Pope Francis.

Well over 80 percent of Romans are Catholic. The striking friendliness and overriding sense of altruism of the population is reflected in the city’s low crime rate. In the community I stayed in adjacent to Vatican City, a working and middle-class neighborhood, women walked alone at night through minimally lighted streets. One evening I strolled out to get a few items from a nearby market, a small deli/convenience store (Rome is populated with mom-and-pops). Besides the aesthetics of its design, I was fascinated by the diversity of products and struck by the dearth of those from the U.S. So when I made it to checkout with my purchases, I was astir with strange emotions. Once the attendant helped me configure my Euros, I exited and strolled back to my hotel on Porta Cavalleggeri. After a few blocks, I instinctively touched my pocket for my wallet and cringed. It was missing! Nearly simultaneously, a motorbike pulled alongside, arm outstretched. The helmeted figure deposited the wallet in my hand, saying that the store owner had asked him, a customer there at the time, to deliver it.

The attitude toward marginal populations, especially the homeless, was clearly displayed. I counted less than ten in my week and a half stay in Rome. The reason for the overall low numbers, I discovered, is that the Church actively cares for the homeless, giving them shelter to get off the streets, and goes well beyond just that. It attempts to integrate the homeless back into society, humanizing a population that has been dehumanized by social forces.

This attitude was also evident among the policing authorities, from the local and state police all the way up to the national police, the Carabinieri. The local police officers, weaponless, were inevitably eager to direct me on my journey after a welcoming conversation. Always in clusters, they responded like a team of social workers. As did the Carabinieri, who are well armed. I spotted a cluster of these officers in the area near where Pope Francis was finally buried, at the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica, not far from the Piazza Del Popolo (the “Plaza of the People,” founded in Roman Republic times as a gathering place for ordinary folk). I was trying to navigate my way back to the café I had roamed away from. Seeing some very large weapons, I took the precaution of hailing one of them from twenty feet or so, asking for permission to ask a question. He smiled and waved me on, his weapon remaining idle. Since he was fluent in English, we chatted briefly about the crowds and Los Angeles before he set me on the right course.

This was such a contrast with an experience I had at the L.A. international airport when I left for Rome. In the chaos of intersecting queues, and needing help, I swiftly approached a security guard who possessed what looked like the same large weapon the member of the Carabinieri possessed. He raised it with a menacing glance and sent me to an elusive information center.

I wend my way through the crowd scattered around the imposing Egyptian obelisk—shipped to Rome in 40 A.D. by Emperor Caligula—in the center of St. Peter’s Square. I’m en-route to the area left of the Basilica. This is where Pope Francis and selected Cardinals live in the Casa Santa Marta, a hotel that also houses visiting dignitaries. It’s my last day in Rome and I want to get a copy of my book into Pope Francis’s quarters. As I get closer to the edge of the square, the crowds become denser. It’s a beautiful sunny day—the best one since I arrived in Rome—bringing out an extra quantity of faithful. I respectfully zig and zag my way around the patches of spirits to a path that leads toward the entrance to the Pope’s living quarters. This area is also packed with people, some of whom are negotiating entry with the two Swiss Guards who bookend the open gate. Others appear to be soaking up the aura of this enchanted space. I defer to these fortunate supplicants and wait my turn. A few others on the periphery just seem happy to be here.

One of these I immediately recognize. He’s carrying a stash of umbrellas. I never got his name, but I bought an umbrella from him my first day in Rome. He was perched on the Porta Cavalleggeri, a block or so from my hotel. His umbrellas were neatly stacked on a platform, each one a different color. The two on top were the best quality, he said, and he proceeded to demonstrate, opening these and comparing them to the other inferior ones. We had a nice chat. He told me he came from South Africa because he heard Rome was open to many kinds of people. A carpenter from a small town near Naples is squatting along the gate, ten feet or so from the Swiss Guards. He says he came to the Vatican because Pope Francis was sick, and he wanted to be near him. A bartender from Dublin—Ireland was playing Italy in Rugby—and his girlfriend are snapping pictures of the whole area. They tell me that their fellow workers back home love Pope Francis. A young woman beads her rosary while glancing nervously at the crowd and darts in my direction. She says she’s a maid at a hotel nearby where everybody loves Pope Francis, and she’s praying that he will get well soon because she named her son after him.

A space quickly opens and I hustle to the gate, where I’m greeted by two very amiable Swiss Guards. They say it’s okay to take my book to the Casa Santa Marta. First, however, I have to go through electronic security off to the right before meeting the officer on the left side of the alleyway. Feeling secure now, I snake across the cobblestones to the left and walk the three hundred feet or so to my next challenge, a weaponless Carabinieri who welcomes me with a smile. I show him the package and he lets me pass after explaining that I need to see the officer in the shack around the corner to the right. I snake across the cobblestones and find it. Inside, another Carabinieri inspects my package, checks my ID, and documents my case. After a lively interchange, he says he’ll deliver the package to the Pope’s quarters soon, pointing to a brown door about twenty feet away. I exit the shack and angle several feet straight and to the left, finding myself a little less lapsed as I face the door of the Pope who is still not there.

RIP, Pope Francis

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