Hello, my friend. I'm glad you're here.
If you were with me yesterday, you know I left you in Bethlehem, in the company of a daughter who chose the harder, slower road when the easy one would have felt so much more satisfying. If you missed that one, go find her --- her name is Eustochium, and she's worth your time.
But today I'm not in Bethlehem.
Today I'm in New York. It's early afternoon, that quiet hour when a museum feels almost like it belongs to no one but you. I love this particular kind of quiet --- footsteps softened on stone floors, the hush that settles over a room built to hold something people were afraid the world might forget. I've wandered into the Brooklyn Museum, the way I do sometimes, without much of a plan. I just feel drawn to it today. I get that feeling every so often, and I've learned, after all these centuries, to trust it.
Come with me. Let's see what we can find.
There's a room in this museum I always find myself walking toward, even when I tell myself I'm just passing through. It's dark in here, deliberately dark, the kind of dark that makes you lower your voice without being asked to. And in the center of it, a table. Enormous. Triangular. Set for a banquet that will never be eaten, for thirty-nine guests who will never sit down. This is Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party. I am so glad that is has come to live here.
I've stood in this room more times than I can count, and it still stops me every time.
Each place is its own small world --- a hand-painted plate, unlike any of the others, a chalice, a runner stitched in threads that took hands months to finish. No place cards. You're meant to already know who's sitting there, or to wonder, or to ask.
It's a triangular table -- 13 place settings on each side -- wing one is set for the women of prehistory to the Roman empire -- there settings of Ishtar and Kali -- I know them both. There are settings for Sappho and Hypatia also. I try not to take offense that Judy did not set a place for me.
And then the table turns a corner. This is actually my favorite side.
Oh look there she is -- the first setting in the beginnings of Christianity -- my friend Marcella. Marcella of Rome. Look at it. The plate. The chalice. The careful stitching in the cloth beneath it. Underfoot, more names than I can count in gold on pale tile --- hundreds of them, holding the whole table up like a foundation nobody sees.
Seventeen centuries, and Judy thought to set a place for her.
Marcella -- she was my friend. Let me tell you about her.
She's born in the year 325, in Rome, into a family with a palace on the Aventine Hill --- one of the old, quiet, wealthy hills of the city, the kind of place where a family's name means something before a person has done anything at all to earn it.
I remember the year mattering more than anyone in that house realized at the time. Far to the east, in a town called Nicaea, bishops from across the empire had just finished arguing their way toward an official answer to the question of who Christ was. An empire that had spent centuries trying to stamp Christianity out was now, astonishingly, trying to define it from the top down --- one creed, one answer, agreed upon in a room most people would never see. Marcella arrives into a world where faith is starting to become something written down, settled, official.
Her mother, Albina, raises her in that house --- pious, educated, generous with what she has. I remember Albina well. The kind of woman who gave without being asked twice. And when Marcella is still a child, an exiled bishop named Athanasius passes through Rome, fleeing the very controversy that Nicaea was supposed to have settled. He doesn't stay long. But I remember the air in rooms like that one, whenever he entered them --- the sense that the argument wasn't nearly as finished as the official record wanted people to believe.
Marcella grows up inside that argument, without ever needing to raise her voice in it.
She marries young, the way daughters of her class did. Seven months later, she's a widow. I watched a great many young widows in that century face the same choice --- marry again, quickly, safely, the way everyone expected --- or refuse. A consul named Cerealis, uncle to a Caesar, comes forward to court her. It would have been an easy yes. Powerful, respectable, exactly what her family would have wanted.
She says no.
Instead, she turns toward something Rome barely had a name for yet --- a life of prayer, of plain dress, of fasting, modeled on stories she'd heard about ascetics far to the east, in Egypt and Syria, people who'd given up everything to live simply and pray constantly. Nothing like that existed yet in Rome, not really. Not as a household. Not as a community of women choosing it together.
So she builds one.
Long before anyone famous arrives to lend her legitimacy --- forty years before, in fact --- Marcella is already gathering women in that house on the Aventine. Reading scripture aloud. Asking questions of it. Arguing over what it means. No priest is required for that. No bishop's permission. Just a room, some books, and women willing to take the questions seriously.
I want you to hold onto that detail. Forty years. Because when the famous name does finally arrive, he's not bringing her something new.
He's walking into something she already built.
The famous name is Jerome.
He arrives in Rome in the year 382, summoned by Pope Damasus himself to serve as his secretary --- a scholar's scholar, sharp-tongued, brilliant, already known for his command of scripture in its original languages. And where does the pope arrange for him to stay? In Marcella's house. The one she'd already been running for four decades.
I remember watching him walk in that first day, full of his own reputation, the way clever men often are. And I remember watching that reputation meet its match within the hour.
Because Marcella doesn't sit quietly and receive his lectures. She asks him questions. Real ones --- not the polite kind meant to flatter a visiting scholar, but the kind meant to actually understand something. And when his first answer doesn't satisfy her, she doesn't let it go. She pushes. She disputes. She circles back around a passage until she's satisfied she's grasped not just what it says, but why it matters. Jerome himself would later write that she never once let him rest content with an easy answer --- that whatever he'd spent years gathering through study, she took, tested, and made entirely her own.
I don't think he expected that. I think he expected an audience. He found a colleague instead.
This is happening at the exact moment the wider Church is deciding that questions like these belong to councils, to bishops, to men with titles gathered in imperial cities. Nicaea had settled --- on paper --- who Christ was. Other arguments are still raging through Marcella's own lifetime, over the nature of the soul, over how a Christian ought to read scripture at all, over ideas associated with a theologian named Origen that half of Rome finds thrilling and the other half finds dangerous. Marcella wades directly into that fight too, unafraid, her opinions sought out by name.
And here is the part I find remarkable, if you're still with me: when Jerome eventually leaves Rome for good, it's not to his memory that the city's priests turn when a passage of scripture confuses them.
It's to hers.
They come to her house. They ask her opinion. A woman with no office, no ordination, no title the empire would recognize on any document --- and yet the actual, working authority on scripture in that city becomes a woman sitting in a room with her books and her questions, because she never stopped doing the patient work of understanding them.
Nobody voted her into that position. Nobody could have. She simply never stopped showing up to the questions, year after year, until showing up became its own kind of proof.
Her house doesn't stay just a house.
It becomes something closer to a landmark --- a place pilgrims know to find when they're tired and far from home, a place the poor know to find when they have nowhere else. Marcella and her mother built more than a study circle, in the end. They built shelter. Somewhere near where a church called Santa Sabina would later rise, though Marcella never sees that building --- she only sees the ground it will eventually stand on, and fills it, in her own time, with something just as lasting.
I remember the women who pass through that house across the years. Paula comes, wealthy and grieving, looking for a way to turn her loss into something. It's here, actually, in Marcella's house, that Paula first meets Jerome at all --- a meeting Marcella makes possible simply by being the kind of person people gather around. Paula's daughter Eustochium comes too, still young, still finding her way into the life she'll later carry to Bethlehem. A widow named Lea, wealthy in her own right, helps hold the whole household up.
And then, one by one, the others leave.
Paula and Eustochium set out for the Holy Land, and they ask Marcella to come with them. I watched her consider it --- really consider it. And I watched her choose to stay. Someone has to tend what's already been built, she seems to have decided. Someone has to keep the door open for the ones still arriving. She moves to a smaller house on the Aventine with a younger student, Principia, and the work simply continues, quieter now, with fewer famous names attached to it.
She's eighty-five years old when the Visigoths reach Rome.
I won't dwell long on what happens in those days --- you don't need every detail to understand the shape of it. Soldiers come to her house certain that a woman of her birth must have gold hidden somewhere. She has none. She gave it away decades earlier, and lived so plainly since that her poverty itself becomes almost impossible for them to believe. They hurt her for it. And when they finally relent, escorting her and Principia to the sanctuary of a nearby basilica, it's too late. She dies within days.
Jerome writes to Principia afterward, grieving the friend he'd made in that house all those years before. He doesn't remember a follower. He remembers someone whose questions shaped his own understanding of scripture as much as anything he'd taught her --- a woman who took what he knew, and made it more than he'd known how to make it alone.
That's not a small thing to leave behind. A house that outlived its founder. A method of asking that outlived the answers anyone thought were final. And a reputation, still intact seventeen centuries later, for taking faith seriously enough to argue with it until it made sense.
I walk back through that gallery sometimes, after I've told someone her story, just to stand at that table again.
And what strikes me, every time, isn't really Marcella's seat alone. It's the whole second wing of it --- one woman after another, stretching down that long triangular arm, each one living in a different century, a different empire, a different language for God. None of them agreeing on everything. All of them doing, in their own rooms, in their own time, the same essential work: trying to understand what had been handed to them, and what it asked of them now.
Marcella's Rome had its councils. Bishops in official chambers, deciding, on the record, what the faith would formally say about itself. That work mattered --- I don't dismiss it. But it wasn't the only work happening. In a house on the Aventine Hill, a different kind of settling was going on, slower, less official, entirely without permission from anyone in a chamber. Women reading scripture aloud to each other. Testing a verse against their own lives. Refusing to let a question go until it had actually been answered, not just declared.
I've watched that pattern repeat more times than I can count, across more centuries than I'll try to name for you now. The formal, official version of a faith gets written down in one room, by the people already holding the pen. And somewhere else --- a kitchen, a back room, a house nobody thought to call a school --- women keep the harder conversation alive. Not because they were asked to. Not because a title gave them the right. Because someone has to keep asking what all of this actually means, here, now, in this life, and that work has so often fallen to the ones with the least official standing to do it and the most patience to do it anyway.
I don't say this to take anything away from the men in the chambers. Some of what they built still holds. But I want you to notice what Marcella noticed without ever seeming to announce it: that faith isn't only settled once, by the people with the authority to settle it. It gets worked out again in every generation, in ordinary rooms, by people willing to sit with a hard question instead of accepting the easy version of the answer.
That work is still going on. Somewhere near you, probably, right now --- a room you already know, maybe one you've sat in yourself, where someone is asking, out loud, what all of this is actually supposed to mean for the way we live. You may not have thought of it as sacred work. I'd like you to consider that it might be.
I want to leave you with a question, not an answer. That felt like the right shape, given who we've spent this time with.
Where's your room?
I don't mean a place on a map. I mean the conversation you keep coming back to --- the one with a friend, a small group, maybe just one other person you trust enough to ask the harder questions with. The place where you're allowed to say I don't understand this yet out loud, without it costing you anything. Where someone pushes back on your first answer, gently, and you're grateful for it instead of defensive.
Marcella had a house on a hill. Most of us don't get anything nearly so grand. What we get, if we're fortunate, is smaller --- a kitchen table, a weekly call, a handful of people willing to sit with the same hard question for as long as it takes. I don't think the size of the room is what matters. I think what matters is whether anyone in it is actually willing to keep asking.
So here's what I'd ask you to notice this week. Not a new practice. Not a new discipline. Just an honest look at whether you have a room like that at all --- and if you do, whether you've been showing up to it the way she did. Fully. Patiently. Willing to be told your first answer wasn't quite right.
And if you don't have one yet, maybe that's worth sitting with too. Rooms like that don't usually announce themselves. Sometimes you have to be the one who starts asking the real questions out loud before anyone else realizes they were hoping for the same thing.
Before I let you go, I want to tell you where we're headed next, because it's going to feel like the opposite of today in almost every way.
Marcella never left that house on the Aventine. She built her whole life around staying --- tending one room, one community, patiently, for decades, until she died defending the very ground she'd never once been tempted to abandon. Next time, I want to introduce you to a woman who did the opposite. Her name was Lottie Moon, and she crossed an ocean, all the way to China, to plant something entirely new in soil that had never held it before.
Staying and going. I don't think one is braver than the other. I think they're both just different shapes the same devotion can take, depending on what a person is asked to carry and where she's asked to carry it.
I'll leave you with this, one more time, in case you need it today. Somewhere in your life, there's a room where the real questions get asked. Go find it. Or start it. Either one counts.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.