c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

CATANIA, Italy _ On the wall of my hotel room in downtown Catania, on the island of Sicily, is a 30-year-old woodcut that seems to put people and God in their respective boxes.

In the top third, a woman leans over her balcony, the way women do in Sicily. Her right hand grips the balcony rail, and her left gestures welcome, the way a uniformed maid did last evening as she waved to us from her balcony across from a church.

In the middle of this woodcut, a bishop’s miter sits inside a separate box. It seems ambiguous. The box could be a window to something far away, or it could be a long, narrow cell. A cloth waving above the miter could be a shroud about to descend on it, or cloth blowing by. Either way, the cloth has vitality; the miter just sits.

The rest of the woodcut seems, to my untutored eyes at least, to be stray smudges, the way this lava-bedecked city in the shadow of Mount Etna is forever grayed by the still-active volcano.

Vapors from the God-box float upward to the woman in her balcony-box. Her waving hand might be trying to grasp a sweet aroma _ incense? _ or it might be waving away something unpleasant.

This woodcut’s ambiguity reflects the rush-hour parade we saw last evening a block away from the maid’s balcony. Young girls in white dresses and boys in white shirts followed a church banner out from a side street and onto a main street. Behind them came teen-agers, adults, a wagon bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary and a lively band.

First communion? Confirmation? End of a school year? I couldn’t tell. A policeman holding back a street choked with rush-hour traffic couldn’t explain it to me.

To pedestrians like ourselves, out for an early evening stroll, it was a charming interlude. To the drivers of throbbing automobiles, it probably was a nuisance, one more aggravation on the drive home through streets not meant for autos. To motorcyclists who have free rein even on sidewalks, being restrained by a policeman meant loss of their anarchic freedom.

As fervently as some believers want faith to suffuse all of life, the boxing of faith seems well established. People pray at set times and worship on a schedule. Churches own their plots of land and open their doors at stated hours. Otherwise, people go about their lives, and church buildings remain closed. Occasionally, a funeral, wedding or parade will jolt the schedule, requiring policemen to hold back workbound or homebound traffic.

Faith’s ambiguities seem well established, too. Some believers yearn for the bliss of certainty _ some, indeed, find it _ but for many, faith’s waving shrouds and wafting aromas are small parts of a crowded vista, and they are ambiguous. What is sweet to one is stench to another. The bishop’s box might reveal eternity, or it might be as trapped as the woman on her balcony, a window to nothing but itself.

I personally don’t mind the ambiguities. I believe faith was meant to be a choice, not an obligation. To see through to a larger realm, one must choose to draw the sweetness closer, one must choose to see the cloth not as lifeless shroud but as sign of liberation.

Nor do I mind the boxes. We are associative beings; we need to belong. On the street where we were greeted by a smiling maid, we also saw a musical society about to open its courtyard door for a 25th anniversary concert, a group of urban reformers chatting inside their courtyard, an artist talking with friends inside his studio, and pizza-eating teen-agers sitting in their tight circle.

Churches often want to be expansive, to parade through all of life, stopping all traffic, touching every moment. But believers may be at their best when quiet, not loud; when respectful, not brash. In its thrusting mode, religion has tended toward arrogance. It may be that our calling is to give people something to choose _ not a force requiring subservience or rules demanding obedience, but an aroma that beckons and yet can blow on by.

IR END EHRICH