I Validate the Relics of St. Paul

It turns out that the Rome program is for architects, and people interested in architecture. I don't really belong here. But I don't mind - buildings are starting to grow on me (be built on me? No, too forced), and there's a lot of outside class time, like today, when we toured St. Paul Outside the Walls. It's a beautiful big church, which houses a marble and granite forest of pillars, with stone from three different continents. It also has a room strictly for relics.

The main relic is the purported iron chains that Paul wore right before he was executed. These chain links are housed in a little gold bird house in a room that many people have knelt in. In fact, when the church was first built, people used to scrap shavings off of Paul's chains and put them in medicine.

I'm not sure about now, but in previous years the Catholic Church used to require all churches under it's jurisdiction to house a few relics as proof of something - divine right, archaeological interest, thriftiness, who knows? Churches were shut down because of the lack of relics, or the presence of false relics.

It's not just the Catholic Church, but it seems humanity as a whole has taken what Jesus said and just ran with it, like Jim Marshall, the Minnesota Viking who picked up a fumble and ran it all the way back, the wrong way. Humans are so desperate to insert themselves into the gospel and justify themselves to God, like the story told of Paul's decapitation, where the newly separated head bounced three times, leaving three new springs of water. Then his eyes turned to dollar signs and out of his mouth came one thousands nickels, like a slot machine.

And it's me too; whenever I cling to absolute rules or concentrate on strict purity, I'm just trying to make myself matter to something who's intrinsic scale is on a different level.

That's probably all just fancy talk, though.