Bon Dimanche!

This morning Hannah and I walked to a cathedralesque church about half an hour from the dorms to attend service. We weren't precisely sure what denomination we were visiting, but the moment we stepped inside, it became clear that our hosts were Catholic. So, I've officially participated in my first Catholic church service.

What I didn't expect, was the beauty of it all. I've always been puzzled by the draw the Catholic church has for many Protestant artists and intellectuals. Although I respect my Catholic friends, many of their beliefs strike me as un-biblical and superstitious, and their traditions suffocatingly restrictive. And yet, as we walked into the church, I was stunned. The interior was ancient and ornate, with a high, peaked ceiling, and exquisite carving and decoration. The lower walls were paneled in dark, heavy wood, and the floor was of worn sandy flagstones. Seated on frail wooden chairs with wicker seats, a sea of elderly worshipers stretched out ahead of us. Neat, white haired women huddled into their dark coats and scarves, while stoop-shouldered, mild-faced men leaned protectively beside them. One young couple knelt on the stone floor in front of their seats, dark heads bowed. A small boy, one of only two or three young people in the room, squirmed impatiently beside his grandmother. At the front, a few nuns could be glimpsed, scattered here and there, serenely veiled in dusky blue. At a little lectern, dwarfed by the massive height of the ceiling, a frail man in a crimson jacket was singing.

I wish I could describe the music.

His lone voice was rich and sweet, quavering a little with age, filling the room to the last shadowy corner and dizzying height. Below and around his voice, like water flowing, the strong, low chords of the organ began to move, so natural and soft one hardly noticed them at first. And I felt as though some great, towering and enormous music were moving the universe. When the choir joined, it was like drowning in beauty and solemnity. The chapel was hushed, and filled with singing in the same moment. If a wine, aged and mellow could be a song, then this was the sound of wine. It was light, but not the light of a garish day in the sun. It was like the light that shone in little glows of color from the exquisite stained glass windows. It was like a dusty sunbeam falling from a hayloft into the soft, shrouded interior of a barn.

The rest of the service passed, divided between bursting ecstasies of song, clear resonant voices reading Scripture passages, the murmured, measured responses of the congregation, and the occasional moment of deep stillness. The chapel breathed in its silences. One could almost hear the cold air seeping everywhere from the icy stone walls and floor. My heart wouldn't stop pounding and swelling with the music. I could feel something ancient, and strong, and indomitably powerful as the resounding notes poured around me, in the high clear solo of a flute, piercingly sweet and bright, which cried throughout the room in a wild climax. And all about us, now standing, now sitting, now shuffling in a sort of march to take communion, were the elderly parishioners, fragile and obdurate and grave. If a nation can have a soul, then I feel as though I've glimpsed the soul of France. If a nation can have a soul, then I came near enough this morning to touch it.

I understand now, the majesty and allure the Catholic church holds for non-Catholics. And I can't wait for next Sunday, to go back.

Reaching the familiar unknown

When I was packing to leave to France a few weeks ago, the question which troubled me most was this: Which books should I bring? Under ordinary circumstances, I drag three orange crates of books to school with me at the beginning of the semester, and keep bringing more from home every time I go back to visit. (For the record, I always regret this when I'm moving home at the end)

Airline travel is not designed for this sort of bibliophilic extravagance.

In the end, aside from a hefty assortment of French language resources, all I brought was my Chinese-English Bible, my beginner's Mandarin phrasebook, and 4 thin paperback volumes of poetry: Kipling, Wilde, WWI British Poets, and a concise anthology of best-loved poems- books I've been thumbing through tirelessly since high school. (Tragically, Christina Rossetti, Browning, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins didn't quite make the cut.)

My idea was that 1. Unlike a novel, poems can be read over and over again. They're efficient and accessible. 2. There's no way I can get by re-reading these already half-memorized volumes of poetry for five months. Eventually I'll be starved into reading almost exclusively in French out of sheer desperation. (this has already begun)

But one other force was at work. The little huddle of English books on my shelf are filled with lines that have shaped and defined me as a person. Between their increasingly limp covers, I saw my own emotions- loves, hatreds, fears, joys, ideals spring to life, hardened into words I could return to again and again. When I encountered them for the first time, it was an almost physical shock; raw feeling taking form and clothing itself in language. And I knew in each of those moments that I wanted more than anything to tame words like that, to whirl them, and woo them, and capture them on the page so that reality became doubly real, preserved in neat lines of magical printed symbols. Because in the poetry I love most, I didn't find something new. I found something I'd known all along, and never known how to express. It was the familiar, the recognizable, that haunted me, called to me. Sometimes, things leapt out at me which I didn't fully understand until years later. Kipling's 'The Vampire' was like that. I memorized stanzas of it, and then, several years afterward, in a quiet flash of clarity, it slipped into place as neatly as the missing piece of a puzzle.

"And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame

That stings like a white hot brand,

It's coming to know that she never knew why

(Seeing at last she could never know why)

And never could understand."

Or Alice Meynell's 'Summer in England, 1914'

"And while this rose made round her cup,

The armies died convulsed; and when

This chaste young silver sun went up

Softly, a thousand shattered men,

One wet corruption, heaped the plain,

After a league-long throb of pain."

I always remember Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, my high school sweethearts as well. There was something in the grim, heart-haunted music of a forgotten war that shouted to the fiercely earnest and hopelessly confused sixteen year old girl I was.

"But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."

"By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever mourns in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears."

Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' is full of new things at every reading, quick flashing turns of beauty and rage and bitterness.

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word...."

"I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every wandering cloud that trailed

Its ravelled fleeces by."

I've always imagined that all over the world there are things which in some way uniquely belong to certain people. For one man it might be the clean lines of a little cathedral in Germany, for another, a certain row of willow trees leaning over a blue-sky lake on a daffodil-fluttering March day. And you might wait five years, or forty, or a lifetime to meet the things that are yours- the climax of a little-known symphony, a line in a book that springs at you like a crouching tiger, and never know what you're waiting for. But sooner or later, sight by sight, sound by sound, word and smell and feeling, they come to you one at a time. And when they come, you know, you recognize them and catch your breath, and halt for a moment of flame and desire and serenity that crystallizes into joy. It is the familiarity that is strange- blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh crying to you from the unknown, like seeing your face in a mirror for the first time, like seeing the prints of your own feet etched deeply into a path you've never walked before.

Sometimes, they are only a glimpse, then gone. At others, they remain to be cherished and pondered. For this reason I carted this thin stack of English poetry to the other side of the world with me, and, perhaps, at core, it is the same thing that drew me here in the first place, the same thing that drove me to study French so relentlessly and illogically for almost three years.

Coming from the New World to the Old World, which is new to me, I am in a constant state of discovery. Because history is the most eternally new thing in the world, never ceasing to grow, never losing its freshness. I'm here, in part, to learn what I already know, to remember what I've never forgotten. Adventure begins like this. Education begins with adventure.