From a few weeks back now… I went because I needed to go to their store to buy a new cross necklace, but I spent a couple hours walking through the rest of the church, my first time there since I was little.

I didn't take many pictures, not out of some no-photography-in-church rules, but just because I forgot. The basement Crypt level where you enter is overwhelming for its populism, with all the carved stones from the parishes and families across the Eastern seaboard who donated to support the construction. The chapels are ornate through the openings in the blocks, but the spaces mean so much more counted together.

Our Lady of Hope chapel touched me the most on the Crypt level, and the chapel helped with the furlough more than I discussed here at the time. I didn't get a photo, but the chapel's page on the Basilica site got it right, with some adjustments. Most of the area was darker than their pictures, but the very front of the chapel was brighter. If you meshed the photos and the prayer on that page, you'd have the feeling of it.

Upstairs in the main church, I moved more quickly but was fortunate to walk into two strong places by accident. On one side of the nave, near the back, the St. Catherine of Siena chapel had words high on the wall, "Zeal for your house will devour me." I had to look up its origin — what disciples remembered after the awesome table-flipping in the temple. They knew the line from a psalm, but the rampage re-interpreted it.

On other side of the church, the spot I thought was stairs turned out to be the Mary Queen of Ireland room. Did get a couple pictures there. 

I finished at the Basilica with the reason I'd come, buying a new cross necklace. The necklace I'd lost two years earlier was one I'd received after KAIROS senior year at Gonzaga and worn most days since then. I'd lost it about once each year and always found it until the last time when I couldn't. I tore up my apartment looking. I looked all over Jess' condo, on the streets outside, in my building's garage, through trash cans repeatedly. I'd never lost anything that valuable to me. When the anger faded, I spent hours on the Web looking to buy the same cross. Hundreds of pages of Google Image results couldn't find one like it.

After two weeks, I gave up. The necklace was gone, and desperation wasn't going to bring it back. I wanted the necklace safe and around my neck again for its consistency in my life, its stability, and how its loss had broken me showed how little I had taken to heart from it.

So, I decided to let it go, to not hunt any more for a copy, to wait for a time when I wanted something closer to faith and further from safety. I couldn't bring myself to explain it here, but I reached a kind of peace.

Last month I didn't know what brought me shopping for a new one, at least not until I found one. The Basilica's store has some frustratingly political sections, deeply in contrast to the rest of the church, but I lost myself looking through the chains. The only cross to catch me turned out to be a plain Celtic cross. I asked; I wanted to make sure it wasn't the cross of Mongolian steppe farmers, or something else doubtlessly supportable but relatively irrelevent to my neck. Continuing to look, I found another Celtic cross, one engraved with the babe surrounded with music, care, bread, nature, and people, all above scenes of two figures reading and two embracing. The feeling was want, not need.

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