The Silence You Carry to Rome

He steps into this chapter with a ticket in his hand and a continent spread out like a timetable—Rome as home base, Marian shrines as distant stations. Nineteen, degree underway, he measures his life in numbers: 104 days of summer labor at the family business, 113 days abroad, one Eurail pass to stitch it together. Money earned in sweat will become bread, hostel bunks, and third-class seats rattling toward Lourdes, Fátima, Garabandal. On paper it is a study abroad semester: Western Civilization, theology, literature, philosophy, art history, all weighted into the front of the term with six-day weeks so the back half breaks open for travel. Underneath, something quieter drives him. He wants to walk into old churches where candles have burned down to nubs for centuries, to stand where Mary is said to have come down and startled the soil. The empty chair of his life does not stay in Texas. It follows him onto planes and trains, an unseen passenger beside his backpack and guidebook.

As the trains and basilicas take shape in his mind, another ledger opens: the way God seems to handle cash on each side of the Atlantic. He thinks of America’s crowded church corners, new buildings with sound systems and fog machines, sermons braided with pledges and direct-mail charm, coffee and donuts folded into praise. Europe, by contrast, holds fewer altars of his own faith, more stone that refuses to be replaced. If the newer churches were so obviously right, why did the old one stubbornly persist in those older streets? He does not trust easy answers. The chapter lets us watch him sharpen this suspicion, not as an outsider mocking belief, but as a son who has seen the rot and still cannot quite walk away. His planned pilgrimages to Marian sites sit inside this tension. He is not chasing spectacle; he is checking the books, wondering whether endurance points to pride, or to something that still has God’s hand on it.

Once in Rome, time narrows. The university squeezes five heavy courses into long days that run six in a row, as if the semester were a vineyard and all the fruit had to be crushed early. While professors pour out Western history, theology, and art, the students build their own culture: tight groups wandering ruins together, lingering over cheap wine, praying in packs at Roman parishes, laughing past midnight in courtyards. He stands near all this, but not in it, a shadow at the edge of the group photo. His real companionship is Ian, a quiet roommate from Massachusetts whose faith moves without show. Together they choose churches over Amsterdam alleys, relics over red lights. Sex still holds its old power for him, but only when wrapped in the chase, the proof that he can bend another will. Paid bodies bore him. From this distance, he listens to rumors: a classmate and a German stranger on a train, judgment curling around her when the ride ends. Foreign tracks, foreign choices, familiar hypocrisy.

This slice of the story sits at the pivot of the larger book: no longer the child trapped under an adult’s sin, not yet the man who will name his darkness as part of his offering. Here he is a traveler who thinks he can manage grace by itinerary. He marks out shrines of Mary like stations of a private cross, planning to move from Rome’s lectures to Europe’s older catechism carved in stone and soil. The dual music that has followed him—one melody of hunger and control, one of bruised longing for God—plays beneath every plan. He imagines finding answers in places where heaven once broke through to peasants and children, as if their visions might explain why his own prayers met only the ceiling. The empty chair evolves on these trains and platforms. It becomes not only absence but a strange kind of reserved seat, a space beside him that he both fears and hopes might finally be taken up.

Underneath the Eurail maps and course schedules, this chapter whispers a promise it refuses to cash out too early. He quotes a line about vision coming at its appointed time, then goes on stuffing his days with work, miles, and private resolutions about women. He thinks he knows how the semester will go: intense study, holy tourism, flirtation managed at a low simmer. But he lets slip one disturbance in that tidy forecast: somewhere on that Rome campus, under those same night skies his classmates use for drinking songs, he meets an angel. The word lands without explanation, a stone dropped into water whose ripples the chapter does not yet trace. What we are given instead are stakes. This season abroad will not be a scenic pause between college years; it will press on his ideas about God’s absence, about power and desire, about whether his darkness can survive contact with anything actually holy. For now, he walks the courtyard with his questions, the dust soft beneath his shoes.