THE FEAST OF ST. VIBIANA (SEPT. 1)

In partial alignment with my Sicilian side, slightly superstitious and definitely in full embrace of all things unknowable, I have decided to regard St. Vibiana as my personal patron. Praying's not my business - there is no formality to this arrangement. Only nature upholds the bond.

She is, to me, the embodiment of the feminine mystery, itself a microcosm of all things veiled by our limited consciousness. I only know she inhabits a tiny piece of me like a wraith. Luminous, evanescent, opaque.

Her tomb was discovered in Rome in 1853. The inscription reads:

ANIMAE INNOCENTI ADQUE PUDICAE
VIBIANAE IN PACE
D. PR. K. ST.

Her death is believed to date to the 3rd century AD, based on archaeological evidence. No one really knows.

From the words "innocent and chaste," and from the laurel wreath carved into the stone, she came to be identified a virgin martyr. No one really knows.

She rests a couple blocks from my home, in a special shrine in the basement of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. She is, in fact, the patron saint of Los Angeles. The original inscribed stone is there, along with her relics and their devotional presentation. What she looked like, no one really knows.

Each day, I run by both her historic cathedral, dedicated in 1876, and her current sepulchre. I imagine her as a living woman, speaking to me in low tones. Her voice is oracular, compelling but difficult to locate; it trails to a whisper and back again. Important words are missing. Her presence in my life is extremely powerful, yet impossible to interpret.

With women I have loved or desired, women I have known intimately and sometimes for years, I have often found myself reading fragments: a look, a sentence, an absence, the strange weight of something left unsaid. Intimacy does not abolish mystery. Sometimes it enlarges it. The closer I have come, the more sharply I have felt the border where knowledge ends and imagination begins.

Perhaps this is why I chose Vibiana. I recognized her.

This too is a bond upheld by nature. Why it persists, no one really knows.