La Sacra di San Michele

Standing high above the Susa Valley, in the northern part of Italy, I look to the vast expanse before me. To my left, leading to France, extending as far as I can see, snow-topped mountains frame a magnificent green valley, divided by a pencil-mark of an alpine river, the Dora Riparia, that continues and continues as I shift my gaze forward and then to my right, toward Torino. This valley, at 31 miles the longest in Italy, has seen ancient armies and pilgrims pass.

I am standing atop La Sacra di San Michele, St. Michael’s Abbey. Fall, 2013.

I had begun my journey that morning from my apartment that morning in Torino, just sixteen miles east. I took the regional train to Avigliana. The pilgrimage, for that is really what it became, continued through the morning as I walked the streets of Avigliana, visited an old Roman castle, and waited for the time my ride would take me to La Sacra di San Michele – yes Saint Michael’s abbey. Michael’s Abbey. My abbey.

But could I find the saintliness to match?

Some believe that during Roman times this was a military stronghold and later a Lombard fortress. The beginnings of the abbey here, long a Benedictine order, were initiated around 1000 AD. This is where I stand, looking from north to south, pondering the past, the monks who had lived here over centuries in this magnificent location, people who are unknown now and ever, thinking about my future, my own choices about how I might make a difference in the world and what would make a difference in my life - knowing I was just a speck in the universe, but feeling that a speck can blind an eye or light a fire.

It is “place” that shapes our hopes and dreams and view of the world. It is place that inspires us to aspire to be better people and to achieve more than our quotidian ablutions and absolutions require. The Sistine Chapel is the place Michelangelo becomes one who can create that art, that gift beyond imagination. It is place that slaps us in the face and puts its arms around us and draws us into its soul or squeezes our hearts out of our breast. It is place that makes us kindred spirits or mortal foes, lovers forever or a dysfunctional dependency.

At La Sacra, I had looked up and down the valley too. I chose to be here, and only for a day. Like a bird surveying all before me, all after me, and all around me I could see it all from great height, and I suddenly – at the age of 61 – knew I had a calling, that I needed to contribute something, some iota, to the world. But it was much more than a seeing, it was a visceral sigh, an inner opening up, a way in.

idealistic heart, lately jaundiced, contemporarily compromised. Not to make it more than it was, this feeling that overcame me was a start. Later, still on my three-month Italian journey I had another epiphany about my call in this world, this the cumulation of every cathedral visited; every work of art showing love, trial, miracle, and travesty; every monument to the human drama in which we are immersed but seldom recognize. I chose La Sacra di San Michele, and then it chose me.

Silence, aloneness, solitude, abandonment, ascetism, deprivation, ecstasy. Choice or chosen. Volition or obedience. Hermit or marooned.

My relationship with irreverence became a threesome as reverence came back into my life. Standing at La Sacra di San Michele I felt awe rush into me. Looking out over the valley and imagining monks, picturing what it took to build this abbey which sits high, high overlooking the Susa Valley in northern Italy, resonated with me, touched me. I’d been to Rome and Milan and Florence but for some reason this was the place which toppled the reticence I’d had for seeking the mysterious, the awe-some.

It would take more months, more reflection, more time – now back in Idaho - before I would make the connections between irreverence, reverence and, later, to the profound.