The Hyperia roller coast is the UK’s largest and most intense, at 72 m (236 feet) in height, with three loops and a speed of more than 80 miles per hour. After several false starts (due to safety concerns and technological difficulties), it finally opened to the public on June 22, just in time for European Summer 2024, when the European market was estimated to take in a record-breaking 800 billion Euro from tourists.
And as frequent travelers know, the European tourist industry is bursting at the seams, far exceeding 2019 numbers. Even once-neglected attractions have jacked-up prices, launched reservation systems, and implemented crowd controls. I know this first-hand, as my study abroad group from Seattle Pacific University struggled to gain access to its traditional locales, some of which have been “discovered” by the tourist hordes in only the last year or so.
I don’t usually pay attention to roller coaster advertisements, but the Hyperia campaign struck me. With its slogan “Find Your Fearless,” it had an underlying seriousness I wasn’t used to from amusement park ads. Thorpe Park (home of the Hyperia) wasn’t promising me a rush or thrill in the sultry summer of 2024; instead, it was promising me a “hack,” or therapy, that would help me summon the courage to improve my life. The Hyperia was (it seemed) spiritual medicine.
And indeed, the Hyperia ad campaign wasn’t just a slogan. It was a whole, life-saving story. It featured three sympathetic characters, each trying to figure out how to triumph over adversity. One was an actor suffering from stage fright. Another was an aspiring diver who froze on the platform. A third was an unfulfilled worker in a dead-end job. After riding the Hyperia, each character experienced a “breakthrough:” stage triumph, a big splash, and a bold exit from dead-end drudgery. The roller coaster was the key.
Recreation and Desperation
The Hyperia commercials weren’t the only existentially serious and slightly agonized ads of European Summer 2024. One high-end footwear retailer emblazoned its windows with the enormous words “FEEL SEEN. FEEL HEARD.” (They appeared just above a pair of eye-popping platform shoes.) An art gallery presented itself very solemnly as a “sanctuary.” And the entrance wall of a famous theater proclaimed not the title of the play inside, but the words, “FEEL ALIVE.” Such compassionate, high-promising responses to existential desperation were, it seemed, everywhere.
In recent years, the great European cities (particularly in the summer high season) have become more and more like amusement parks – clearly reminding me of Disneyland. Gritty margins and waste spaces have been increasingly lacquered and paved over – at least in the city centers. Local dives and shops have been replaced with high-concept chains. And then come the novelties and spectacles. Plush rickshaws draped in Christmas lights transport theatergoers in London’s West End. Jungles of silk flowers festoon Parisian brasseries. Searchlights and laser shows illuminate the Roman sky. But it’s not all merely entertainment, as the words of marketers increasingly admit. Instead, it’s all part (it seems) of a manic striving to reclaim an authentic sense of purpose in a world that seems meaningless and unreal. We are not talking, here, about a mere undercurrent of desperation. In European Summer 2024, the desperation was flagrantly displayed and humbly owned for all to see.
Learning How to Ask
Maybe that’s why the second big trend of European Summer 2024 – at least to my eyes – was the humble prayer intention basket. In countless European churches this summer, visitors were invited to write intentions on little slips of paper and entrust them to unseen intercessors. It’s easy to imagine such a gesture being ignored, but some of the baskets I saw were literally overflowing with little slips of paper that often tumbled out onto the floor.
Among the many churches offering this quiet service in European Summer 2024, a stand-out was the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome’s historic center (so called because the church was erected in the Middle Ages over the ruins of a temple to the goddess Minerva, or Athena). Here, with touching recklessness, the basilica’s community of Dominican monks invited visitors to write and deposit prayer requests within the glass enclosure of the tomb of St. Catherine of Siena. Santa Maria sopra Minerva is home to many treasures, including a majestic chapel painted by the Renaissance artist Filippino Lippi, the humble tomb of the artist-monk Fra Angelico, and a statue of Christ by Michelangelo. But the tomb of St. Catherine often attracts the most attention, due both to the saint’s appeal and to the dignity of her spotlit tomb, with a beautiful marble effigy, situated by the high altar.
This year, as my family and I entered Santa Maria sopra Minerva, we noticed the overflowing prayer baskets all around (to which my children were magnetically drawn), and we especially noticed the marble effigy of St. Catherine, which seemed to be covered, within its sparkling enclosure, by small, white butterflies. (She seemed like Snow White in her fairy-tale forest, awaiting her prince.) As we got closer, we realized (with some astonishment) that the butterflies were folded pieces of paper. Then, belatedly, we noticed the line of supplicants waiting reverently and bashfully to place their papers near the saint through a small door in the back of the glass.
I think many of the visitors to Santa Maria sopra Minerva (which is a few steps from the Pantheon) did not know who St. Catherine was, or why her tomb was there, or what the altar behind her was for. I think they did not clearly know the character of the One who would receive their prayers, nor did they know about the Dominican community that would collect their scrawlings.
But they did respond to the wide-open doors of the old church. And they did allow a hush to fall upon them when they entered. And they did respond to a point, a space, an opportunity (the tomb), that bore witness to the reality of death, the quest for goodness, and the existence of the transcendent. And they approached that point. And they knelt. (To write on the papers, you had to kneel.) And they asked.
And so, in a way, the roller coaster ad campaign and the solemn prayers in the Dominican church were of a piece. They both acknowledged and spoke to a spiritual hunger that, at last, has forced its sufferers to shed their pretensions to intellectual mastery, technocratic superiority, and individualistic self-sufficiency. In the glossy shop windows of the Marais and Soho, the spirit of the age now says, “I no longer know. Help me.” Under the starry firmament of Santa Maria sopra Minerva’s painted ceiling, the same spirit says, “Yes, I no longer know. Perhaps You, whoever you are, can help.” We are again, after a long time, of a disposition to kneel. May we kneel to the One who deserves it.
In this fearful moment, may we make good use of such a wondrous grace.
