Waiting for God.

Lessons from a magical mystery tour.

TO CELEBRATE OUR FORTHCOMING 25TH WEDDING anniversary, my wife and I gathered up our two daughters from college and the four of us spent a couple of glorious weeks in Italy. We started in Venice, drifted down to Florence, and, finally, savored five amazing days in Rome.

As always, such gadding about is full of lessons, and as we meandered into quaint churches, through cobblestone piazzas, and along scenic canals, a corresponding inner journey took place.

Perhaps the first lesson of all travel--the one that breaks the interior logjam--is that other people don't live the way we do. Comedian Steve Martin, after his first trip to France, announced incredulously, "Man, they have a different word for everything!" The sweet taste of such awareness opens one's mind to possibilities: "Hey, we can live life any way we want!" Which is why parents are full of both hope and fear when their kids head off to study abroad.

I had studied in Rome 30 years ago, and returning as a 50-year-old was a little like picking up my favorite book from when I was a teen and reading it again as an adult.

In Florence we went to the Accademia to see Michelangelo's David. I remember my first reaction to that amazing sculpture 30 years ago. I was angry at Michelangelo and at David's perfect physique. Being a young man of 20 and unsure of myself with "young women of the opposite sex," I anguished that he had set the bar too high for the rest of us young men. And yet I had stood there awestruck with more admiration than envy.

This time around, I admired the David for its vision of a man in balance within himself. I've long since abandoned hope of emulating that physique, but now the ideal he embodies that I seek is his poise: his inner balance of head, heart, and guts. It seems to me that in our society, way too often, these three elements in men operate completely separately, with no one at the central controls.

David comes across as a man who knows his own power and where that power comes from--the heart of Yahweh.

His interior repose is in stark contrast to Michelangelo's statues of six prisoners that flank the long walk up to the David. Slated to adorn the tomb of Pope Julius II, these were unfinished (or were they?) sculptures of captured slaves. This time, they seemed even more alive than the David, struggling to escape from their prisons of stone, on their way to being formed and freed. I could relate to their state much more than to the perfection of the David. It seemed to me that Michelangelo had learned a lot about humanity in the 20-some years between his David and when he fashioned the prisoners.

But the biggest revelation Michelangelo offered awaited me in the Vatican. In the grandeur of St. Peter's Basilica, a massive space filled with oversized statues of saints and historic church leaders, I was drawn to the quiet Pieta. Unlike most of the other statues whose objects struck bombastic poses for dramatic effect--many of them appeared as though they'd been surprised by snakes in their beds--the Pieta's drama came not from bombast but from the most human situation it depicts. It doesn't try to overwhelm or persuade, but to invite you into mystery. Its theme is not easy and certain triumph but rather the paradoxical truth that at the center of the Christian faith is surrender.

As I stood meditating on this classic work--on the tender mother, impossibly young, open in her grief, not turning inward or bitter or closed--I witnessed a scene that has been repeated countless thousands of times in the world: a parent embracing a child struck down by violence. I realized that for all the glory that Rome exudes, it all is based on the truth captured here in the Pierce--the response to the question, "Where is God in our suffering?"

And the answer I came to in my reflection before the mother and her child is that God is not to be found in our rush to confident certitude but rather in sitting open and waiting and in paradox.

I sometimes feel bad that my faith is not stronger or more sure. But my experience in St. Peter's showed me that the authentic spiritual moment is not the one in which you strike a triumphant pose of certainty but when--even in the deepest sorrow-you hold your pain and await the presence of God.

TOM MCGRATH, contributing editor of U.S. CATHOLIC magazine.