Nicole’s Pilgrimage
When I studied in France years ago, I lived in an attic maid’s room and took meals with a family who lived in a small apartment in a nice neighborhood. The family rented a room within their apartment to another student, an Evangelical my own age from Arkansas, and we all often had dinner together. The family forbade us to speak English to each other in the house, and we often had very deep and fascinating conversations over dinner, even with our slightly mangled French. Nicole’s hadn’t studied French for very long, only five semesters or so, and her language skills were weaker than mine.
Our host family were indifferently Catholic, perhaps practicing a little more than most French people. I was lapsed at the time; I think I attended Mass two or three times in the six months I lived there, but visited dozens of interesting churches. The other student–I’ll call her Nicole here–attended small non-denominational churches, many run by expats, in Paris. Sometime that spring, she heard about an organized pilgrimage to the cathedral at Chartres. She had never visited that cathedral, and made a note of the meeting time and place, deciding to go.
Now, Chartres is a spectacular cathedral, and an old, old traditional pilgrimage site. As Nicole reached the gathering site around dawn, she noticed that other people had large backpacks and other camping gear. She didn’t pay much attention to this until the group of people started to move. She assumed that they were moving to buses…or to a train station….to some sort of motorized transport.
They were not. This was a traditional pilgrimage, and it was on foot. Nicole realized this too late, traveling with only the spring clothes she was wearing and her school bag.
I think that the trip she was part of was the Notre-Dame de Chrétienté Pentecost pilgrimage that happens every year, and that she had received bad information about the nature of the trip. (Here’s another article about the Notre-Dame pilgrimage, which sounds fascinating.) They had traveled outside of the city before she realized what was truly going on.
She decided to continue with the trip. She kept to herself and was too shy and embarrassed to ask her traveling companions for help or for food. Some people may have shared water or snacks with her, but she traveled without meals. When it came time to sleep, she separated from the group and slept on the ground with no blankets. She had decided early on to make this a true pilgrimage of her body and her spirit, and though I don’t think she framed it in quite those terms, to unite her suffering with that of Jesus on the cross. She did not tell the other pilgrims how she was suffering, and as she told us about her pilgrimage trip, she was modest and matter-of-fact, not seeking sympathy or pity.
I’ve tried very hard to forget most things that happened to me during that part of my life, but this story that she told at the dinner table has stuck with me. Her suffering in silence, determination to finish the trip without complaining, and ability to view a disaster as a spiritual learning experience have stuck with me.
It reminds me of a lot of adventures we have in this life–things we never would have started if we had realized beforehand how difficult they would be.
I finally made it!
Last week I slept in and missed Latin Mass. Which is kind of sad, since it’s at noon. Today I slept through my alarms and somehow woke up twenty minutes before the start of mass. I hurried to wash my face and put decent clothes on, then grabbed my veil and missal but failed to bring my directions to the church. I had a vague sense of what street it was on, but I don’t know that city well at all, and I was traveling there more or less blind. And late.
Somehow I made an accurate guess as to where to get off the highway, then made a left turn, scanned the skyline for a familiar-looking steeple, and found a sign pointing to the church. Yay! There I was, with other people toting missals heading in late, too. I felt bad, but not as bad as I would have if I had been the only one heading in then.
Using missals is completely foreign to my generation of liberal Catholics. I’ve never had one before, and even with bookmarking the Pentecost pages ahead of time, I got a little lost, gave up, and just sat there absorbing the atmosphere instead of following along. I felt sort of secluded in my veil, which added to the meditative feel.
Receiving communion kneeling at a rail was a first for me, too, and like most of what went on during the hour and a half that the Low Mass took (!!), felt foreign but also somehow “right.”
The parish has a luncheon for Latin Mass folks to socialize. I grabbed lunch and ran away, not really talking to anyone. I hate being shy sometimes.
Pretty pictures in a row
I read today’s B.C. strip before learning that the creator, Johnny Hart, had died. I find it rather fitting that he died right before Easter, since the Holy Week strips seemed to be the crowning glory of his year, if a little confusing at times. (”How old was Jesus when he was crucified” is a math question?)
It will be strange to see the comics page without his work, even if I found it uninspired and unfunny about 95% of the time. I hope that the space he currently occupies on comics pages will be ceded to a new, creative, young (well, under 70) cartoonist.
The Catholic Church: Amusing pyromaniacs since A.D. 33
I’m home visiting my parents for easter, and went to the Vigil. It was about two hours long, but there was a huge bowl of fire. My love of the Big Bowl of Fire stems not only from my garden-variety pyromania, but also because most of the most moving religious moments I have experienced have involved candles or other fire symbols.*
The service was quite joyous, but the liturgical dancers were back. They had albs and gold sequined capes–the costumes looked something like what would happen if James Brown were an altar server.
That, and the tendency of more and more people to hold and raise their hands during the Our Father, bother me to no end.
The crowd was very small. I wonder if people are starting to avoid the vigil because of how long it is.
* - This does not include the girl in the Confirmation class ahead of mine who set her hair on fire during the service. That was just funny.
The Palm Sunday Tourist
Five years ago, I was studying abroad in Paris. I had chosen a program run by a very “artsy” college, and the nature of our field trips reflected this. (So did the student population, but that deserves another entry, and not in this blog.)
One trip brought us through Normandy, mostly looking at churches, architectural sights, and art museums. None of the D-Day tourism that I would have liked, but still fulfilling. Walking around Rouen was eerie since I had taken Joan (of Arc) as my Confirmation name, and we were able to get off our tour bus and wander over to the spot where she was executed.
I’m a little off track, though. One of the towns we visited was Honfleur, which is a lovely port town where many of the early trips to New France set sail. My own ancestors might have passed through that port.
Honfleur is mostly interesting for architectural reasons, and the most unique feature is its church. Built in the 17th century, and the largest wooden church in France, the interior looks like a boat. I tried to dig up pictures online that do it justice, and I can’t find any. I was shooting on film back then and running low, so I didn’t take a lot of photos in Normandy.
Our art history teacher guided us around various sights in Honfleur as she did in the other cities we visited. When we reached the church, it must have been around 10 AM, and there was the entire congregation outside, receiving their palms and singing. It was Palm Sunday, which had always been my favorite Mass, especially when I played guitar.
Part of me wanted to stay for the entire Mass, but the structure of the tour meant that I couldn’t. I was still discerning at that point whether I wanted to convert to Zen Buddhism, but I still felt compelled to stay. I dutifully followed the tour group into the church, instead.
When my eyes adjusted and I got my bearings, I recoiled in horror. I wanted to walk out. It wasn’t until I saw elderly people sitting in the pews and noticed the organist playing that I realized we were wandering into their church to gawk at the architecture during Mass. Even as an atheist, I always had a very keen sense of the sacred. Even though most of the congregation was outdoors, it felt like an intrusion to me. I looked at what we were supposed to see, admired the unique ceiling, and then bolted out of there to wait for the rest of the students.
As I stood there, someone handed me a program and a palm. The people of the town were used to having random groups of foreign tourists wander into their services. I wasn’t regularly attending Mass at the time, but I stood and participated until my tour group left. Still angry hours later, I tried desperately to articulate exactly why I was so angry to my friends, but I couldn’t put it into words. I still really can’t.
France has become very secular, especially since 1968, and a large part of its draw as a tourist destination is its religious landmarks. Churches are everywhere, even if they aren’t well-attended.
Thinking about it now, I suppose my anger was twofold. First, that our tour leader and the other students thought nothing about wandering into a religious institution in the middle of a service. Cynically, I wondered if they would have behaved the same way if we were touring a Buddhist temple. I also wondered if we would have intruded in the same way had the Palm Sunday service been held entirely indoors. Second, I always found it infuriating how tourists in churches wander in and show so little respect to their surroundings, even when there is no service going on. It’s a fact of tourism, and of life in these churches…and a source of income to preserve the beautiful buildings.
Yet that doesn’t mean it isn’t so fundamentally wrong that a 20-year-old girl shakes in anger at her teacher and classmates.
