Must be a need in a person.

Beneath those penants I was telling a story. I never knew where the penants had first come from, now hanging onto that part of the low basement ceiling. It is easy to imagine a golden 1950s varsity championship, with fans all frantically waving their cloth triangles.

But I was doing what I often did when talking and thinking at once, and looking up at the blemishes on the ceiling. There were stains from water pipes and curious gashes and marks from I always imagined what. Or that remnant glow-in-the-dark ink on the wall.

I was telling about a quiet place I had visited called the Sacra Santa. It was small, tucked adjacently to a much more attractable building across some square, and so it did not gain many visitors. It took me a long time to find it through the old winding streets. But I wanted to, and I must have passed along the cobbled stone several times before I found the way.

It was a chapel, and inside was only a long set of high steps, twenty-eight of them. And every step was made of marble several thousands of years ago in Jerusalem, though they were now wrapped beneath encasing steps of hard oak that was warped inwards from the pressure of those who have climbed them. Once inside, no words were allowed to be spoken. They say those steps were the ones that Christ climbed towards his judgement. The blood from his whipping was said to have dripped from him onto what must have been that characteristic of warm softness that rock takes on in sunlight. Wherever that blood had fallen, there were small holes carved out of the oak for one to see as they climbed

But to climb those steps now, one may only do so on their knees. There were a few others there, and I watched for some moments. The movement of each looked pained, and all took pauses to rest upon each broad step and summon what strength and prayers were left in making that climb. I did the same. I didn't know anything, did not understand the relevance of penance and judgement to prayerful reflection, but I could feel all the things that were within me. For every one of those twenty-eight steps, my knees burning, I gave the same prayers, each the same but growing more earnest the higher I climbed. I felt the silent pain in the few others around me be reflected in my own as my knees and my spine grew an increasing ache. To believe that an entire marble staircase had travelled from Jerusalem to Rome may be difficult or easy, depending upon how you consider the historical economics of Catholicism. But that does not matter when you reach the top of the steps. I think about spirituality and the steps of that chapel now, and how it was only most important that the prayers I felt at each instance along the way came to me on their own. Because they came on their own, they lit up my soul with a truth that led me back to tell this quiet story in that basement room.

So there were no glittering rooms beyond the top step. Other than pretty frescoes, once your wordless and aching body reaches the top, you exit the chapel with only that complete experience of self. And if I had reached with my hands and shared what those repeated prayers were then, while looking towards those penants and along the curve of light from the lamp, I would have said that I was glimpsing their complete reality. And if I were to tell of them now, they will have always stayed the same.