Keep in touch with your faith: uneasy with medieval rituals and relics, a mother reflects on the very different ways in which she and her son approach and practice their faith.

In the churches of northern Italy, aside from tourists admiring frescoes or debating the difference between the neoclassical and Baroque, we found mostly old women. Perhaps it's that way everywhere. The closer we stand to death, the more burdened we are with aches, worry, weakness, the more time we spend in the echoing, incensed house of God. And women, with more years alone, have more time for it, perhaps more cause.

Many times, I've made my way to quiet churches, seeking forgiveness, courage, or the granite calm that envelops such places. But in Italy, the old women's prayers were often accompanied by veneration of objects, a concept foreign and unsettling to an American Catholic, who spent her childhood in the old Latinate church of catechism and rosary and became an adult in the simpler, less austere canon that followed the Second Vatican Council. Gone were the scapulars and pamphlets about grimly virtuous saints. Rosaries, relics, and an army of saints were swept away like cobwebs. Now Christ stood clearly at the center of things. To me, consecrated bread and wine are holy, the living presence of Jesus Christ. But bits of bone, wood, brass?

In Italy, the older tradition lives on.

One by one inside Milan's great Gothic cathedral, the aged Italian women in bristling wool suits approached a bronze crown of thorns welded to an iron grate. They rubbed it tenderly, as you would rub a sore spot low on a loved one's back. Slowly they stroked it, as if calling spirits, pressing causes. The crown was polished bright with the hopes of so many hands.

My only experience of such tactile faith is the veneration of the cross on Good Friday, where we line up, shuffle down the aisle, kneel or stand to kiss the black wooden cross, and so honor Christ's redemptive suffering. Even this feels strange, to honor an object when God cannot be contained, to embrace wood with arms and lips like a lover.

And yet gesture and symbol are at the heart of the practice of faith. Water poured on the forehead cleanses the soul. Bread on the tongue feeds the spirit. Oils on the body prepare the mind for death. Christ gave us actions, which the church turned into sacraments, to mediate between the worlds of body and spirit, time and eternity. Our species, suspended between God and beast, needs a physical connection to the divine.

As I watched the old women, my son followed them and rubbed his own silent hopes into the circlet of bronze thorns, a symbol of suffering and mockery now made an object of honor. At 21, Ben is muscled and straight-backed, with hair wild as Beethoven's. A buffalo would have looked no stranger in the line of wrinkled worshipers.

I was startled but not surprised. My son has long been curious about the old ways of faith that we never taught him. An elderly neighbor showed him how to say the rosary. Once he startled a visiting bishop by kissing his ring. It has been God's fine prank to give a mother who considered herself too refined for such business a son drawn strongly to it.

My son's ability to let go the intellect and embrace medieval rituals of faith is so much greater than mine. He knew no more about this crown than I, but trusted that the natives knew what they were doing. I wanted to know the story behind this crown rather than approach it with purity of faith, zeal of hope. Who made it? What powers does it claim? What evidence is there? I am, like Luther, doubtful of its spiritual meaning.

Uneasy at the border between superstition and faith, I take refuge in knowledge, culture, reason. When I pointed to the stone tracery around the cathedral's great windows--I'd read books and took my role as tutor seriously--my son hushed me: "Mom, could you stop talking about the art? We're in a church."

But art can be a way to God. In medieval and Renaissance times, paintings and sculpture that expressed the great mysteries and magnified Christ and his saints were an essential tool for teaching a largely illiterate faithful. Beyond the skill and beauty that please the eye, great art still speaks to the faithful heart.

I did not say this in Milan. Only later, in Venice, when I led my son to a far quarter to see Tintoretto's vast, stormy Last Judgment, and in Florence, where I plugged one 200-lire piece after another into the electric box to light Giotto's tender fresco of Saint Francis' death, did I urge my son to see more on the wall than paint and perspective. "The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God," declares the Catholic catechism. My son and I sought God in different objects in the same churches.

Even he was unsettled, though, during a day trip to Siena when we visited the church that honors Saint Catherine. Daughter of a peasant, one of only three female Doctors of the Catholic Church, Catherine spent her brief lifetime serving the dying and despised, yielding to ecstatic visions of Christ, and trying to make peace between warring factions of her beloved church. Her most famous achievement was persuading the French pope to return to Rome after decades of comfortable exile in Avignon.

In a small glass case, Catherine's head is kept in a painted wooden reliquary. Her shriveled finger is on display on the shelf below, a small, leathery digit propped up like a cigar.

To modern sensibilities, body parts are linked with grotesqueries. Think Hannibal Lecter and Idi Amin. To understand this display, I had to read about ancient times, when early Christians risked Roman punishment by celebrating the Eucharist at the graves of martyrs.

After the Edict of Milan in 313 gave freedom of religion, covert worship at graves evolved into streams of pilgrims to memorial churches like Catherine's in Siena. Relics were needed as physical emblems to support tentative faith and to substitute for pagan talismans. Often, relics were credited with special powers. In the usual way of supply and demand, there were no doubt plenty of knockoffs.

Enthusiasm for physical mementos of holy people began to fade after the Crusades when saints' relics yielded primacy of place to Christ. Thomas Aquinas argued that it was better to follow saints' footsteps than to carry their bones. Gradually, honoring the Eucharist pushed relics off stage.

The contrast between my faith and my son's was evident again at St. Peter's in Rome, where a line of pilgrims waited to kiss the shoe of Saint Peter's statue. Again, the bronze toe was polished bright by attention and stood out amidst the colossal gloom and splendor. Again, I felt Protestant in my alienation; God doesn't reside in bronze shoes. The holiest shoes I've seen filled a room in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, stripped from Jews on their way to death camps, each boot and oxford the scuffed relic of a martyr.

Somewhere I had read that if you make a Confession, say your penance, and kiss Saint Peter's shoe, a plenary indulgence is deposited in your account in heaven, canceling time owed in purgatory for your sins. While I kept my distance, my son joined the pilgrims, sought out the confessional, said his prayers, kissed the shoe.

Once I did something similar. As a child, on Good Fridays when special indulgences were offered to the faithful, I would recite the required words in church, retreat to the vestibule, then return for another round of prayers. I tallied indulgences like get-out-of-jail-free cards in Monopoly.

Even for a child, it seemed too easy. Accustomed to battling the same doubts and weaknesses year after year, I have grown wary of complete absolution. Youth is more comfortable with absolutes.

But I realized at St. Peter's that my son's faith, too, is mediated by art, art distinguished less by the artists' genius than by the admirers' belief. The crown of thorns in Milan was crafted by a metal worker, the mammoth statue of Peter in his namesake church was made by a sculptor.

And whether faith is inspired by fervor or connoisseurship, we still struggle with the human. As a writer who wrestles with self-doubt and worries that God has more urgent work than cloistering myself with words, I want to know how great artists handled a seeming puzzle. As Christians, we are called to humble ourselves before God and be generous in God's service. Yet the act of creation requires boldness, confidence, and, yes, selfishness.

Holy people have always struggled with the conundrum. In one of his journals, Thomas Merton described being taken to task by a superior for letting ego overwhelm the spiritual mission of his writing: "You like to be famous, you want to be a big shot, you keep pushing your way out--to publicity.... Yet your writing is now becoming verbological--but your words must be incarnate."

In his journal five days later, Merton wrote: "O Lord my God, where have I been sleeping? What have I been doing? How slowly? Awaken, once again, to the barrenness of my life and its confusion.... How little faith there has been in me--how inert have been my hours of solitude, how my time has been wasted."

C. S. Lewis suggests the solution to the conflict: Keep the ego on short rations. Achieve a state of mind that celebrates equally another's accomplishment and one's own, knowing that the talents involved were given by God. God "wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another," Lewis writes.

The human mind is fueled more readily by cheaper fuel. In Florence, I looked at Brunelleschi's dome and Ghiberti's baptistry doors, both works of brilliance, and recalled the artists' lifelong rivalry. Day by day, we veer from vanity to doubt, joy to wretchedness, generosity to envy.

And so I led my son to churches, not for relics or the hope of miracles. I brought him because they held Caravaggio's image of Christ calling a disbelieving Matthew from his gambling table, and Giotto's portrait of a tonsured monk grasping the hand of the dying Saint Francis and smiling because he believed that Francis was rising with Christ. Paint brushed on plaster 600 years ago still speaks of the frailty of human life and the endurance of holiness, faith, and work done in God's name.

The morning of our final Wednesday in Italy, my son and I went to the pope's weekly audience in St. Peter's Square. I made the arrangements primarily for my son, who honors John Paul's evangelism and enthusiasm for youth and embraces his traditionalism. As usual, I'm the skeptic. While I admire the pope's efforts at reconciliation with other faiths and outreach to the Third World, I am dismayed by his stubborn conservatism toward women, marriage for priests, homosexuality, and family planning.

But I, too, was moved by the sight of the old man, moving with slow determination, slurring his words, brushing back windblown hair with a huge, tired hand, praying for us in many languages. He endured hours of blessings, cheers, and processions so that thousands of pilgrims could see him and receive his blessing.

A row behind us, teenagers from New Jersey strained to take photos. A row ahead, students and parents from a Polish school unfurled a proud banner. In my pocket, I carried a rosary for an elderly friend who would never get to Rome. The worn black beads had been her late husband's; she planned to give them to her grandson and wanted the pope's blessing to enhance the legacy.

In that vast square, many things divided us--language, age, nationality, theology, styles of belief. But the old and new traditions of faith converged there, overlapping in memory, in practice, in the strangers around us, and in the people we love. This stubborn faith, with all its faults, goodness, promise, and history, endures.