La Mistica: Everything is Grace

I knew life itself is mystical. I learned everything is grace.

It isn't that some saints are "the mystics"
though some certainly are,
or that sainthood is a mystical tier of grace, even though it is also that.

It's that mystic means hidden,
and God has hidden Himself in the real:
in the Eucharist, in work, in wounds, in surprise joys, in each one of us and in each creature. The same God who sometimes lets the smell of roses fill a room for no reason at all.

Walking between Peter and Paul in Rome, the old Latin still speaks:

Rome is still praying if you listen long enough.

In meeting new friends in a chapel before dawn.
In singing Ave Maria in the Piazza di S. Salvatore in Lauro at 9am.
In a conversation that goes further than planned.
In the quiet strength of the Altar of St. Joseph, where Christ is guarded by two Apostles,
where the silence is inhabited by the visible and invisible alike.
Even in the way Luca, the security guard at the Cathedra Petri,
spoke to me after Mass,
as if God had arranged even that small exchange.

Again and again, I discovered Jesus around every corner,
in every encounter.

On his feast, standing before the saint who turned a river to spare the poor,
I understood how holiness bends reality toward mercy.

He stepped into the flood and changed its course.

That is sanctity: not escape but intervention,
not distance but nearness.

I am amused to find myself imagining what Dorothy Day would have called it.

At the Eremo delle Carceri, the forest breathed centuries of prayer.
Stone caves felt shaped not only by time but by longing.

Brother Daniel spoke with the clarity of someone who trusts silence
more than explanations.

He mentioned that Pope Leo had been in Assisi that morning,
and somehow I had brought him to the hermitage.

Grace moves quietly and without our permission.

In the heart of Assisi stands the Santuario della Spogliazione,
the place of Francis’ stripping.

What you might expect is a story; what I found was a summons.

St. Francis surrendered until nothing remained but freedom and God.

His poverty felt strangely contemporary,
an antidote to the age of accumulation.

A letting-go that becomes belonging.
A simplicity that becomes fire.

The saints are close,
not distant figures in stained glass but companions moving quietly
through the days.

Francis and Clare. Monica. Cecilia. Nicholas of Tolentino.
Catherine of Siena. Carlo Acutis. John Paul II. Dorothy Day.

From a hater of San Carlo and Day to a defender.

They appeared at the edges of my journey,
as if holiness is not behind us but beside us.

Through the Church Herself came grace in its steady, unhurried ways:

a relic entrusted,
the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano opened,
a child baptized,
a vocation carried by patient love,

all unfolding in the slow rhythm of God,
who wastes nothing and arranges everything.

At the conference, theologians spoke about the mystical life.
But Rome herself became my real classroom.

Mary’s question at the Annunciation stays close to my heart:

How can this be?

Before the Fiat comes wonder.
Before obedience comes discernment.
Before surrender comes the willingness to be surprised.

This is the beginning of the mystical life:
a readiness to let God interrupt us.
Not visions or phenomena,
but those too, even the odor of sanctity.

I do not understand all that God is doing.
I do not need to.

I ask only for the grace to recognize Him
in the person before me,
in the work entrusted to me,
in the path unfolding beneath my feet.

Life is mystical.

God is faithful.
May we never miss a grace He sends.

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