This text was written for our first CCM Newsletter, February 2007
In 1999 I traveled throughout Italy with my partner. During our travels, there were many moments in which I was moved. I would like to talk about one moment, in particular. In it there was a door. A man holding a torch opened it. It led into the catacombs. It was the day after Christmas, on the outskirts of Rome.
There were about ten people gathered at the door. Before we descended, the guide lit another torch and gave it to a volunteer so that there would be two light sources: one leading the group and one capping it off. This way, the guide said, we would be book-ended in light. It was important to be book-ended in light because, the guide told us, people just die down there.
He told stories of people who went in and never came out. How at one time the mafia used it as a place to dispose of enemies. He told us that once the Italian equivalent of a boy scout got lost on a guided tour and had never been seen again.
The catacombs are a maze. The guide said that they had been mapped, but not completely. Like space, he said, you go so far and then you don’t know. He said that this was no Lock Ness monster situation. It was real. The danger was Death and not haunted house death, but Real Death and Real Death is not discriminating. It takes who it wants according to a logic we cannot understand.
As soon as we descended and twisted around a corner the guide stopped walking. Now, he said, to make a point.
He called for a volunteer. A tall, awkward teenaged boy raised his hand. Take five steps forward, the guide said. Oh do be careful! the boy’s mother said. But, said the guide, you must take no more than five steps. The teenaged boy took five steps and with each step he moved away from the group and into an inky erasure of darkness. The guide asked if we could see him. We could not. It’s cold, the boy said. Yes, the guide said, it is.
After the point was made, we moved deeper into the tangled catacombs. I asked the guide how he knew where to go and how to get back, into the world. We must memorize three pathways, the guide said. We must be able to feel the lines of those pathways at all times in our minds. That he said, and I carry a map which includes the main tunnel routes.
Occasionally we would stop and the guide would tell stories. Here a famous woman is buried. There: fifteen early martyrs. He showed us the earliest Western representation of the Madonna and child painted in the 1st century. He showed us shattered pottery shards from previous communions when the early Christians would secretly meet to celebrate mass. Every ten to fifteen minutes the guide would do what he called a check-in. Everyone would look for the person they came with to make sure they were still there and then everyone would have to say so out loud. People did this all at once and it made a padded grumbling sound in the deep darkness.
The catacombs architecture was varied. In some places the ceilings were low and in some places so high you could not see the ceiling at all. In one particular narrow passage the guide stopped. Perhaps you may wonder, he said, how the builders of the catacombs knew their way in and out. Everyone wondered. They too had to memorize the passage ways, the guide said, can you imagine. No one could. But, he said, there were some clues.
The passageway was lined with cubbies, the length of adult bodies, stacked one atop the other. The guide brought his torch low to the ground and then slowly raised it as high as it would go, towards the ceiling. The very top cubby was not as long as the others. It was short, about the length of an adult arm. The guide told us that the very top cubbies were for babies. Oh that’s so sad, said the mother of the teenaged boy.
Abandoned babies left to die at various crossroads in Rome would be gathered by catacomb workers who would then strategically place the baby corpses at the top of walls where certain corners met, and these dead babies formed a grid and this grid was like a language, and if you knew how to read it, you could navigate your way out of the catacombs should you become lost. Yes, the guide said, a language of dead babies, though not a language anyone remembers now, the interpretive key lost to time. Did they care about the babies, the woman of the teenaged boy asked. Not really, said the guide, it was more of a logistical thing. Jeepers, she said.
As we wound deeper and deeper I found myself next to the guy holding the rear book-ending torch. Staying in the thick of the group had begun to feel claustrophobic. The guy holding the torch wasn’t a very good torch holder. For example, when I slipped behind him he didn’t even notice. I let myself fall three steps behind the group. Then five. Then ten. I let the group round a bend and waited for six seconds then another six seconds. I finally let myself stand still for forty seconds as the group moved on, turning a corner I could not see. What I felt then was a particular sensation, like I knew where I was, even in the pitch black darkness. It was a feeling of knowing where I was exactly.
The pitch dark was Holy Darkness and I had this strange sensation that somewhere inside of me I knew how to navigate the house of Real Death by reading the graves of babies, a language read with eyes closed. It was the language of Persephone. And when I thought of Persephone, something whispered to me from the darkness: you are Persephone. The feeling was that I wanted to stay. The feeling was that if I didn’t have to worry about food and concerned people above ground, I would stay down there and be content to wander in the Holy Darkness.
When we re-entered the shrill overcast day light, our eyes hurt. A man claimed he felt disoriented. The teenaged boy asked if there was a snack-stand around. The guide revealed he was in fact Dutch and upon further inquiry, also a devout Catholic who believed in efficiency. I bet, he said, you are all glad to see the light of day.
For a long time I could close my eyes and draw up the feeling I had in the catacombs. It would begin in the space between my stomach and heart and it would spread outwards, slowly, like a dark moth unfolding its wings within me. It was the Holy Darkness feeling. Eventually I lost my ability to conjure the sensation. Since Chalmette Candle Ministry has been underway I’ve been thinking about the Holy Darkness feeling. John O’Donohue, in his book ANAM CARA, suggests that if we journey into the deep interior mazes of our own souls we should take a candle with us rather than a flashlight with its harsh beams. He suggests that we read into the mysterious chambers of our hearts with the kind of light that honors mystery itself; the kind of light which embodies the dance between revelation and concealment – the holy known and the holy unknown, where the energy of possibility dreams. This kind of light allows for mystery - and at times painful ambiguity - because God requires the full spectrum in order to be known, and this spectrum includes both light and dark within its expression. Reading our most interior soul places by the light of candles we begin to see the shadow shapes of patterns. We begin to experience the reading of these shadows as the moment-act of prayer itself.
Like the night sky in which stars are always being born while others are simultaneously receding, at Chalmette Candle Ministry we have seen patterns arrive and depart. The practice of keeping the candle ministry is the practice of living prayer, a mandala consciousness which, because it is living, is always changing and sending up the shimmerings of new suggestions, implications, meanings.
We read by many lights – and within any one light, there are many more lights which reveal new readings. I do not know where these readings end. Like space and the catacombs, perhaps they don’t. Perhaps the process of revelation - when revelation allows for mystery - is enough, does not require a known ending or limit.
Chalmette Candle Ministry has taught us that the process of revelation is constant – the patterns are always changing. We have watched cancer prayer candle requests fill our altars for weeks at time, and then watched how this pattern gave way to requests for people in the process of dying – those preparing for the transformed experience of Real Death - and we watched how these requests yielded into many concerning children – sick ones, very small ones, ones that had been lost to life through untimely death or other choices, ones who would only live a short while, ones who were struggling to stay longer through machines and other frightening complications. And so on.
The love behind each and every one of these requests was intentional and powerful. We felt that energy every time we read the original petition, said prayers, and prepared and lit the candles. We formed energetic relationships grounded in love for these people.
We would like to thank each of our friends – the ones who have participated in the web of light by hosting candle vigils and thus extending this ministry, and for those friends who came into our lives via the altar. Though we may not know you personally, we extend to you the special friendship that is a pattern all its own, born of prayer mandala consciousness, the mystical rose.
Before Chalmette Candle Ministry our lives were like most: too busy, up/down, full, rich in textures – beautiful and difficult. Our lives are still like that, but with the added experience of having an amazing opportunity to connect to God in a more profound way every day. Mother Teresa, I think, had it right when she said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them”. What I’ve remembered is how much I want to love people. Here’s wishing you love. Enough love. And even more than that.
Chalmette Candle Ministry Headquarters
February 2007
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