An Accidental Pilgrimage

On 18 December 2017, I, like so many more before me, cried in St. Peter's Basilica. Specifically, I cried in the necropolis (burial ground) under St. Peter's Basilica looking at the plexiglass case in which St. Peter's bones are stored. It wasn't the 2000+ year old remains of the man who essentially founded the Catholic Church that got me. In fact, the only reason I was looking at what is left of the person Jesus is said to have described as the "Rock of the Church"was because I was trying to maintain my composure and divert my attention away from the physical rock that was turning me into a sniffling, leaky mess. Nicknamed the "graffiti wall", the rock is historically a place for faithful individuals to come and transcribe their prayers to the "Apostle of the Apostles". The wall is a plaster mess of partially-legible Latin scribbles crafted by anonymous hands, and the sight of it was completely overwhelming. Here I was in a body that is always breathing, or metabolizing, or salivating, or thinking, or something standing parallel to a structure that changed only by the will of other mortal bodies like mine. The juxtaposition of my constant physical change with the wall's physical consistency was flooring. It made me think about the pilgrims who wrote on the wall; maybe one furrowed his brow when he was thinking, maybe the women who came along 34 years later on a similar mission had a dimple that you could only see when she laughed, maybe her son with the cowlick made the same trip to visit St. Peter to pray for the recovery of his beloved. The authors of the entries on the graffiti wall have been lost to history, but their dreams, their desires, their passions are preserved in a public archive.

As an Honors student, I am required to complete an undergraduate thesis. I have chosen to study personal narratives of suffering through genre studies of memoir, journal, and oral storytelling. I have found that the journal is unique in that it is a deeply personal document that captures a moment shortly after it passes. Thinking about the pilgrims who contributed to the graffiti wall allowed me to see the wall as a sort of communal journal through which those in need could find the catharsis and peace of the written word. This perspective silenced my mind- for about 30 seconds I was in a state of meditative mental quiet. This silence was broken by three words that eventually wedged their way into my psyche: "this is important". The graffiti wall in St. Peter's Basilica invited me to step outside of my experiences and transcend the constraints of time, cultural, and ideological differences to connect with the raw humanity of unidentified persons, and for that, I am humbled and grateful.