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Silence and Belief |
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written
by ninamil7 / 10.24.2005 |
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| Silence and Belief |
1 of 1 |
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Assignment |
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Everywhere I go in Rome – down every street and around every corner – there’s a ubiquitous presence of faith and religion. Whether it’s a group of nuns walking down the street or yet another basilica, there is no escaping faith and belief in this place. This leads any visitor to Rome to wonder about religion and all of its implications. No matter how hard I try, my understanding of faith and religion always seems to come up short. In both the cloister of Santi Quattro Coronati and the Capuchin Crypt, I was overcome with a sense of wonder and confusion about religion.
Leaning against a pair of skinny columns in the cloister of Santi Quattro Coronati, I was very quickly able to forget where I was. The immutable silence and simple garden drew my attention away from the outside world and into a place where I could sit and think. It was not until the faint sound of a siren cut through the air that I remembered the busy city that lay beyond the walls. Inside this quiet, serene place lives a group of nuns who have vowed to remain just as quiet as the cloister for the rest of their lives. A vow of silence. What a peculiar idea. Normally I would equate silence with nothingness, but during my short visit to the cloister, I came to see silence as something much more significant; something heavier and fuller. Silence drives your mind to a journey through itself. Without the presence of audible outside stimuli, the mind searches for something within. As I traversed through different layers of my mind, I still couldn’t find an answer to the question that was really bothering me: Why? Why devote your entire life to some supernatural being? These nuns seem to think that their extreme dedication to faith and belief is for the good of mankind, but how so? Do they think this is “God’s will?” Then I have to wonder, what is “God’s will” and who gets to decide that? For being one of the most serene places in Rome, this cloister certainly conjured up a considerable barrage of questions to my unsettled mind.
Across town, in the Capuchin Crypt, I didn’t even need silence for a load of questions to assail my mind. From the second I stepped inside I wondered, what is this place? I walked down the dark hallway filled with arches and ceilings flanked with bones designed as decoration. Off the side of the hallway were six open rooms, five of which were filled with thousands upon thousands of neatly arranged human bones. All of this was housed below the Church of the Immaculate and was passed off as some sort of religious artwork. The blatant, public desecration of human bones is what these friars passed off as religious artwork. If I wasn’t confused about faith and belief before, I certainly was now. How could anyone seriously consider dressing up skeletons in monk robes and arranging hundreds of skulls to form a niche along the wall as appropriate religious symbolism? What is religion if this is one of its manifestations? It’s the motivation behind this type of work and therefore behind people’s faith that has always eluded me. In that dark hallway, with a chandelier made of tibias, fibulas, and vertebrae hanging above my head, I was once again unable to make sense of the ever-present faith and belief found in Rome.
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