---

When I set out on a recent pilgrimage to Rome, I expected to be awed by the sheer spectacle of the scenery. How can you stand in the Colosseum or pray in St. Peter's Basilica and not be bowled over by the magnitude of the place?

But what I quickly learned was that this pilgrimage would have more to do with people than with places.

The morning of my flight, I was near panic because Hurricane Earl was due to arrive on Long Island exactly when I was scheduled to take off. I did something I almost never do: took Lourdes water from a top shelf in the kitchen and sprinkled some on my forehead, and on my kids and husband for good measure.

I headed to the Albany Airport to catch a shuttle bus to JFK and struck up a conversation with others waiting at the bus stop. Two women, joined by Rev. Paul Tartaglia, were headed to Lourdes, of all places.

As they shared prayer books and asked me to write down my intentions so they could bring them to Lourdes, I could feel my fears begin to evaporate. My pilgrimage was already underway and we hadn't even hit the Thruway.

My 10-day visit to Rome as part of a program for foreign journalists who cover the Catholic Church will be seared into my memory not because of the big events, but because of the smaller moments of grace.

God really is in the details, especially when those details take the form of human encounters that make a place or a meal or a church come alive.

One evening, two colleagues and I had to "settle" on a little restaurant near the Vatican when we couldn't find the one we were looking for. There, at a long table in the center, was a group of men talking and laughing and eating.

As we ate pasta cooked to perfection, the men began to sing at the top of their lungs, first in Italian and then in Polish. They were seminarians from Belarus, and they sang extra-loud once they heard our applause.

The next morning, as I sat in the front row at the papal audience, the camera panned to a group of young men.

When the pope said their name, they stood up and started singing. I looked at the video screen and saw the seminarians from the night before - "our" seminarians.

Alone in a throng of thousands, I suddenly felt at home, and I realized that what often seemed like aimless wandering around the Eternal City was clearly full of spiritual purpose.

Even the long wait for the papal audience turned into a moment of unexpected grace, when the Jesuit priest sitting next to me spotted my Magnificat and asked if I wanted to join him in morning prayer. Amid the noise and chaos of the auditorium, we created a silent sacred space.

Then there was my Friday night trip to Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of the oldest churches in Christendom, where I was moved to tears as I sang Vespers in halting Italian along with the vibrant local community of Sant' Egidio, a fast-growing international lay group dedicated to peace and justice. And my meal at the French restaurant run by African nuns where, midway through the meal, all of the diners turned to face a statue of Mary and sang the "Ave Maria" together.

Sacred places certainly make the physical aspect of pilgrimage meaningful, but it is often the purely human moments that propel us further down our interior path, proving that we don't have to leave home to travel far.

(Mary DeTurris Poust lives in Delmar, attends St. Thomas the Apostle parish and blogs at www.notstrictlyspiritual.blogspot.com.)

(10/07/10) [[In-content Ad]]

---