Whiter than snow

Our Paris sojourn has delivered many unexpected gifts. Most recently, snow in quantities rarely seen in the city, especially so early in winter. How much more beautiful can this city get? And now, with the melting snow, the Seine is so high that the Bateaux Mouches cannot fit under the bridges (giving the local residents a temporary reprieve from their insane flood lights at night). What has come as the biggest surprise, though, is how much people have figured in what we had imagined would be primarily a duet in a city desert. The visits of family and friends have given us greater pleasure than we could ever have imagined. And there have been new friendships full of kindness and generosity. Shared meals in restaurants, introducing us to delights we would never have found, and in our studio, miraculously served around the small trestle table from our two-hotplate kitchen.

One memorable and random gift is sprinkled with the snow of early December. We’d just returned from accompanying our daughter Alice and her partner Greg to the airport, it was mid-afternoon and I checked my email. There was a message from the American Cathedral: can you do a funeral tomorrow for a family that want a female Episcopal priest? The next day was John’s birthday, but it was such an out of the ordinary request how could I possible say no? So, I found myself in the early evening sitting around the trestle table with a French photojournalist and his American wife listening to his family story and his desire that his mother be buried by a woman.

His mother, he said, had described herself as “neutral” when it came to religion. Thelma been born in the U.S. and whilst her heritage was Middle Eastern and orthodox, she was baptised an Episcopalian. She had spent most of her life in France, though, marrying Albert, a secular Jew of Georgian descent. Their only son was anything but neutral. Not because he was a devout practitioner of any religion, but because he had encountered evil. He had smelt it on the streets in Rwanda, seen its imprint in Bosnia. He understood how evil can creep in, catching us unaware, eating away the fragile bonds between us, destroying everything in its path. For all this, for all that he had witnessed evil’s dark presence, he also knew, and believed in, the power of love. His mother’s last years had been muddied by failing health, hers and Albert’s, and relationships had been damaged. Had evil crept in the door? He wanted prayers: for the safety of his mother’s immortal soul.

What can we say in the face of evil? If Thelma had been Jewish we would have said the Kaddish, a bold declaration of faith in God’s goodness and providence in the face of death. It feels stubborn and defiant, helpfully so. The Christian response is equally bold: resurrection. “Go tell my brothers”, Jesus said in his appearance to Mary Magdalene, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” God is just as I have shown you, he is saying, Love wins.

We gathered the next day at Montparnasse Cemetery, just a handful of us, a few metres from the starkly bare graves of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to pray for Thelma, for her ailing husband, her son and daughter-in-law, for eternal rest and for healing. The more than cold day was turning icy, and snow began to steadily fall. But we still told her story, and read Saint Paul’s words about the persistence of love, in English and in French. Then, into the silence of the falling snow, a young Polish opera student offered the gift of song. Eternity could hardly be more beautiful. We laid Thelma’s body in the grave, and one by one offered pink roses to the earth, with prayer. The last rose was placed by the soprano as she sang the final notes of her song.

“I’ve never been so cold,” John said afterwards. But it may be that I’ve never been so warm. “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow,” David cried in the aftermath of the destruction unleashed by his taking of Uriah’s wife (Psalm 51.7). Standing in Montparnasse that day in the falling snow you could almost see our longing for redemption being met by the love of God.

By the time we got home my feet were wet and frozen. Now I have been able to purchase some boots, with grateful thanks to Thelma’s daughter-in-law. Albert died the following day. May they both, Thelma and Albert, rest in peace.

Toussaint

As many of you know I am an iconophile, a lover of icons. (Bliss when we discovered, through the nudge of some new friends, a wonderful collection of Greek and Russian icons in the Petit Palace – another of Paris’ amazing museums and one that seems to be primarily visited by locals.) One of the things I love about the Orthodox icon tradition is the tangible sense of the communion of saints. Walking into an orthodox church you see the saints – or their icons, which are intended to evoke their presence.

For most Protestants “the communion of saints” is a line in the creed. Indeed, growing up in a primarily Protestant environment saints were pretty suspect – they were the things Catholics had, and we didn’t. When I studied French culture in early high school I remember being impressed, and envious, that French children had a name day as well as a birthday, celebrated in conjunction with the saint corresponding to your given name. In the daily mass reading booklet that I’ve been using here there is still a “Bonne fête!” for those whose first names are listed each day. The correlation between saints' names and contemporary French first names has thinned however and the lists seem rather random!

Toussaint, All Saints Day, is big here in France, as it is in much of Europe. It’s a public holiday (France is definitely a serious rival to Australia as a “land of the long weekend”) and the florist shops are full of autumn flowering chrysanthemums destined for the graves of loved ones – our everyday saints. It seems such a helpful, healthy custom – to have a day, when we all, together, remember our dead. Permission to grieve, give thanks, remember, ponder, whatever is necessary this year . . . In the park next to Notre Dame I saw a woman turned toward the river weeping. A friend travelled to a cemetery with her step children to place flowers on the grave of their mother. The cemeteries are filled with the living and the dead, and with flowers.

Notre Dame was, of course, awash with special services. At Vespers the choir was filled with banners of the saints of France, most of whom really existed, flesh and blood like us in this perplexing and complex world. At the end of the service they were processed out – a strangely moving sight. The saints didn’t seem so distant really, homey even, embroidered simply on white satin cloth. In Australia we can now officially process with our one national saint, Mary MacKillop. Indicative, really, of our national differences. Here the pavements are thick with layer after layer of human history. In Australia our soils are scraped bare with age, subtly inhabited by our ancient indigenous people and then, yesterday, the rest of us arrived. For all the wonder of the cultural deposits of Europe, though, I am missing that sense of bare space, and especially its gift of silence.

On Toussaint at Notre Dame the great Emmanuel bell was rung. This only happens now on high feast days or to mark significant events – its vibrations are a threat to the fabric of the towers! Installed in the 17th century (how?) the Emmanuel bell weighs over 13 tons. The clapper itself weighs 500 kilos. Hearing this bell sound has been one of the most extraordinary experiences of our time here. The first time was on the Feast of the Assumption in August – and it was then a random encounter. This time we sought it out, checking the Toussaint timetable on the Notre Dame website for the “Sonnerie du grand Bourdon de Notre-Dame de Paris”.

Three times during the day, for fifteen minutes, the deep, resonant tolling of Emmanuel could be heard – joined by those of the bells of the north tower in a veritable symphony. We loitered as close as one’s ears would allow, John preferring the stereo effect from the Western portal, me turning up the bass at the corner of the southern tower.

The words “de profundis” must have been invented for this tone. I found myself searching for the sound's depths and heights. And wondering, on that crisp, autumn All Saints Day, is this the sound that reaches heaven? I could, suddenly, absolutely appreciate Karl Barth’s insistence that “one cannot speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice." This was a very loud voice indeed. But in the end human, and if this is the best we can do, well, the scale of God is unimaginable. Which is why I love the silence, the particular silence that comes, uninvited, into being when the bell begins to slow, singing its final, gentle beats and comes finally to rest. You can hear then, just for a moment, the silence that touches the otherness that is God, Divine Mystery. Standing in front of Notre Dame, like Elijah on Mount Horeb, you find, as have all the saints, that God is not in the wind, or the fire, or the bells, but in the silence.

So, belatedly, Bonne Toussaint!

P.S. November 11th, another public holiday, has also come and gone, marking the 92nd anniversary of the signing of the armistice in 1918, the main day here for remembering all the war dead. The Emmanuel bell holds a special place in French consciousness and history. Its tolling announced on the night of 24 August 1944, that the liberation of Paris was underway. After all the time that has passed since two world wars were fought on this soil its impact is still close. A small village in the north had to be evacuated this week whilst some unspent munitions were exploded. The landscape there is scarred with the workings of war in a similar, though deadlier, way to the goldfields of Victoria. This Thursday, November 11th, the Emmanuel bell tolled at 11 am, along with all the church bells of France.

Autumn

It's autumn, my first European autumn since 1966. The best of my childhood memories include many from this season: apples and pears finally officially harvested (in contrast to the premature, clandestine, sour pickings of summer); then piles of golden leaves and a hedgehog caught up in the sweepings; the dark wooden shine of chestnuts bursting from their prickly shells; crisp days, soup for supper and the smell of bonfires. Here in Paris it has been damper than I recall and I have spent too many days inside at my books, but for the last two Sundays we have walked in beautiful autumn gardens, Versailles and the Tuileries. We’ve breathed in late flowering roses, feasted on the shifting tones of blue and purple blooms, watched for the turning of the leaves. Palace gardens set against the changing sky: a persistent steely grey last Sunday, and this week a changing drama of dark clouds and sunlight.

Autumn has brought many other delights. At the end of one fruitless work day last week we did a circuit of the islands and then secured a table in a café-bar that looks over the Seine to Notre Dame. With cooler days chaud vin had appeared on the black board, and so we basked in the last half hour of slanty sunshine sipping a warm brew of wine and spices. And on Saturday, an unexpected afternoon of pleasure: lunch and good conversation with friends of friends, here to celebrate a significant wedding anniversary. There have been wonderful concerts too, including Verdi’s Requiem performed by a bunch of medicos from Germany as a fundraiser for Medicins Sans Frontiers. Brilliant. The bass was, in his spare time, a professor of paediatrics. Europe is so cultured.

Autumn has always been my favourite season. But after autumn comes winter, its darkness, the cold. As children this sense of the closing in of life, the coming of winter, is less of a weight. Is it because we live then more in the moment? Or perhaps it is because, then, we were not burdened by so much experience so can live more lightly.

Walking home from St Eustache after Verdi we saw, as ever, the other Paris. Men and women dossed down in doorways for the night, layered with sleeping bags, blankets, plastic. And when it rains? And is colder?

I have been pondering the beggars, the street folk and the homeless ever since our arrival here, and have made little progress. There is a beggar at the door of every church. Never has the story Jesus tells of the rich man and poor Lazarus at the gate seemed so vivid. To give or not to give? And what? I try at least to give the dignity of a greeting in my stumbling French to those I see regularly, but the questions still nag.

Around the quartier of Saint Paul, were we shop, there is stable group of homeless, mostly men. In the mornings they are usually gathered around a corner near a supermarket, where in ones or twos they take turns in looking out for each others’ bags and bedding. At night they sleep near our apartment on a wide veranda underneath the Cité des Arts building on the Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, which runs parallel with the Seine. The veranda is a prized place of good shelter and at night it turns into a long dormitory. Is this a choice of sorts? There are government run shelters, but here, I’ve observed a sense of fraternity, care and community. Fragile though it might be, it’s something we all desire and call home. The roads to the street here, like everywhere are multiple; and the solutions?

One of the most loved figures of twentieth century France was Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), a tireless worker for the poor, for refugees, the homeless. In the cold winter of 1954, in the face of an increasing number of deaths among the homeless in Paris, he called for “An Uprising of Kindness” (insurrection de la bonté). A savy political operator he targeted the conservative rich and their wallets opened, helping the growth of the Emmaus communities, which provided shelter, food and hope for the homeless poor. The work of his foundation continues. When we first arrived in Paris we visited the Place des Vosges, an exquisite symmetrical Renaissance square that once housed the aristocracy, now simply the rich. Hanging from three of the windows (how did they get there?) were banners proclaiming the incidence of homelessness in present day France: “at least 100 000 live in the street”; “600 000 people have no personal housing”. Government statistics, like those on poverty, are contested. What can’t be contested though are “les morts dans la rue”, the deaths in the streets. There is a small collective based in Paris that since 2002 has collected information about the men and women who have died on the street or when living on the street. In 2009 they documented over 400 deaths. Their average age is 49.

I walked up to the Place des Vosges this afternoon to see if the Foundation Abbé Pierre banners were still there. They aren’t, but the homeless, in their various habitual spots, are. It is a bitterly cold afternoon and it is not even winter yet. And I wonder whether, living amongst them, there is still the Dominican brother that Timothy Radcliffe once spoke of – a true mendicant of Christ, returning to base just once a week for a meal and a hot shower.

Not Paris, Chartres

Last week we had a break from Paris. We’d been to Chartres before and loved it and so, even though it is an easy day trip from Paris, we decided to stay overnight. John found reasonably priced accommodation in a former monastery right behind the cathedral. It was perfect: predictably basic, our room had large casement windows and a view of the spires. It instantly felt retreat-like, which is what we both actually needed, so we re-booked for two nights.

Our first view of Chartres as we walked up the hill from the railway station was through a ferris wheel. An interesting juxtaposition that had me pausing to take a photograph (the first of many). Why the fun fair? After a quick visit to the tourist centre we discovered that we had missed, by precisely one day, the illuminations of Chartres which now run from April to September each year. Over the weekend, the season had closed with a special Fête de la lumiere, parades and music, and a last hurrah for the coloured lights ( http://www.chartresenlumieres.com/).

Illuminations have taken off. Back in Canberra I have delighted in seeing old Parliament House bathed in pink, and when travelling across town check the current colour the tower on Black Mountain. Even better was Brian Eno’s spectacular lighting of the Sydney Opera House last year. As we wandered around the old town of Chartres over the next two days we saw evidence of the illuminations – from the large glass and metal boxes that have become semi-permanent fixtures to the discreet footpath lights that mark the night walk through the town. It must look amazing!

In the Middle Ages there were different attractions of course. In the ninth century Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald, donated a piece of cloth to the cathedral which was supposed to have been worn by Mary when she give birth to Jesus. It ensured that Chartres became a place of pilgrimage and thereby boosted the local economy. The Virgin’s veil was an effective fundraiser. Later Chartres emerged as the foremost scholastic school in Europe. The present, astonishing cathedral building dates primarily from the eleventh century. It is the last of a long line of buildings that had succumbed to pillage or fire. Whilst it suffered the standard re-dedication as a “Temple of Reason” during the Revolution, some citizens of Chartres saved it from planned demolition. If nothing else, argued the architect Morin, it would be very difficult to achieve. Indeed!

What do people come to see now? The building of course, the “most perfect” Gothic cathedral. And the glass. Chartres cathedral houses the most important collection of medieval stained glass in the world, including the famous Blue Virgin dating from the mid-12th century. And stone. The 12th Western Portals and the 13th century North and South porches: a remarkably intact ensemble of medieval sculpture. And, of course, for the contemporary spiritual seeker, the Labyrinth, the largest and best preserved from medieval France. And no, there is no evidence that medieval pilgrims circled round its paths on their knees (see http://www.labyrinthos.net/chartresfaq.html for some nice myth busting).

Pilgrimage is an oddly persistent human occupation. Moving in order to see better, more clearly, I think. The danger with modern tourism is, of course, that we see nothing, nothing at all, in the everything that we try to take in (a tendency typified by the pervasive phenomenon of taking photographs of artworks in museums rather than actually looking at them). A real pilgrimage, one that is open to discovery, seeing anew, takes courage. And here I think of a pilgrim I met today outside Notre-Dame de Paris. He wanted to look inside the cathedral but was not allowed in because he was carrying a large backpack. I offered, in a stumbling mixture of French and English, to mind his bag for a few minutes. He reached into his coat and pulled out piece of paper from his wallet. On it was written: “I speak only Czech.” We laughed and signed, and as we walked across to a seat where I could watch his bag he showed me the large scallop shell attached to his bag: “Santiago de Compostela” he said. I speak only Czech: it is a hell of a long way to Santiago from Paris.

On our visit to Chartres we saw the sign of the shell in front of the cathedral, and I think there were Camino pilgrims in the monastery-hotel. Were we pilgrims too? Perhaps in the way that Philip Larkin speaks of in his famous poem “Church Going” I could say that it “pleased me to stand in silence here” in that “serious house on serious earth”, recognising the hunger “to be more serious”. And in the gentle space of two days I did, I think, see some things more clearly.

The colour blue, or rather, all the colours of blue. I try to soak it in, to remember for later. And light, falling through the glass, sometimes sharply, sometimes softly, white, or glowing pink. Familiar Gospel stories told in pictures, considered, frame by frame, through the telescope of my camera. The four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, sitting on the shoulders of the prophets: interconnection, dependence. The angel that I’d photographed in 2006 still watching over the town from the green copper roof: fidelity, stability. Vespers with the Community of Chemin Neuf, their warm welcome, the hospitable liturgy. A song we know, the one we used for the blessing of St Bernard’s back home: Ubi Caritas et amor, Deus ibi est (Where charity and love are, God is there). I am singing “Alleluia!” in the cathedral that I first loved from a distance as an undergraduate history student at Sydney University more than thirty years ago. A feast of bread and duck paté shared in a park as the moon rises with my best and most patient friend. Two cranes circle the southern spire, consider the possibility of making their home here. The black sky etched against the cathedral’s soft gold stone. Sleeping in the light of a near full moon, watching it arc across the dome of the sky. The morning star.

And finally, there is an ordinary mass, with ordinary people, in the damp, quiet crypt, where we remember, with St Matthew, that we are les malades (the sick) and I am thankful, ever thankful, that Jesus says: “Je ne suis pas venu applier les justes, mais les pécheurs”, I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

The city and the city

There is a speculative fiction novel by China Miéville called The City and the City. Its basic premise is that two cities coexist in time and space, yet each chooses to be invisible to the other. I haven’t read it (John has) but I like the title and the metaphor: the reminder that the spaces we inhabit hold multiple stories, layers which coexist, and that what we see involves choice. For example, when I wrote about the procession fluviale in my last blog I was also aware of a darker story of priests and Paris. On 2 September 1792 just a short way from the Ile de la Cite, at the Carms, a Carmelite monastery in the Latin Quarter which had been converted into a prison, 150 priests were killed for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the new republican constitution. The Revolution was radically anti-Christian, but the September Massacres mark a turning point in the Revolution. The Terror was not far away. The Seine, during the Terror and in much of France’s history, was a dumping place for bodies. The procession fluviale is a minor miracle. France still does not greatly love its priests.

The city and the city. Many of the historical layers are bookmarked with plaques. And many of these are within living reach. In late August bunches of flowers began to appear next to the memorial plaques to the patriots who were killed in the Battle for Paris in 1944: “. . . fell here for the liberation of Paris.” One is in our street. On 26th August 1944, less than twenty four hours after the German surrender, General de Gaulle walked from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame, and all the bells of Paris rang. On its anniversary the vieux, the older citizens of Paris, gathered at the town hall to remember and honour the dead.

The city and the city. The Marais, where we are living, has had a Jewish quarter since the 13th century. Last weekend was the Jewish New Year, Roch Hachana. On Sunday morning, as the first act of this new year the Mémorial de la Shoah, next door to us, held a ceremony to remember the victims of the Holocaust who have no graves. More than 76,000 Jews were deported from France to the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 2500 survived. There were around 300,000 citizens of Jewish descent in France on the eve of World War II, less than 1% of the population. Around a third had been French for many generations, a second wave of immigrants escaping anti-Semitism in Russia, Poland and central Europe began in the 19th century. In the Shoah museum you can see the cards, boxes and boxes of them, carefully filed, containing the details of French families of Jewish descent: the bureaucracy that supported the hunt, capture, deportation and ultimately the elimination of citizens. A history which involved the Vichy government in a way that even post-war France had difficulty acknowledging.

Opposite the Mémorial de la Shoah is a school, the Lycée Couperin (yes after the composer, who, of course, played the organ at St Gervais a few metres away). On the wall there is a plaque:

Arrested by the Police of the Vichy government, complicit with the occupation, more than 11000 children were deported from France between 1942 and 1944 and asassinated at Auschwitz because they had been born Jewish.
More than 500 of these children lived in the 4th Arrondissement.
Among them pupils of this school.
Ne les oublions jamais. Never forget them.

There are similar plaques outside many schools in Paris.

What remains scandalous is the failure of so much of the Church to stand against Nazism. It is a huge relief, therefore, to find on the opposite wall, the Mur des Justes, a smattering of priests among the roll of “the Righteous (les justes) among the Nations”, the honour roll of those who helped save Jewish people during World War II. Since this roll was begun in 1963 the names of 2693 people who helped French Jews have been included: their stories, of everyday risks and quiet heroism, are a note of hope in a dark chapter of human history.

The lane between the Mémorial de la Shoah and the Lycée Couperin has been renamed the Allée des Justes and I walk up here whenever I go to pray with the monks and nuns of St Gervais. As I struggled through the French renditions of the Psalms this week two lines of Psalm 1 leapt off the page:

Le Seigneur connaît le chemin des justes,
mais le chemin des méchants se perdra.
The Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

Where would we have stood? One fears one’s own lack of courage. What do we choose to see, what do we choose not to see? The city or the city?

http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/

The bass note

One of our early, habitual delights after our arrival at the beginning of August was to wander, each evening, along the Paris Plages just over the road from our studio. Since 2002 temporary “beaches” have been installed along the right bank of the Seine for a month beginning in late July. (No you are not meant to bathe in the Seine, though I have seen a group of Parisian police swim, carefully suited, around the islands each morning). I wonder if Paris Plages is a consolation prize for the handful of Parisians who do not escape to the real beach or to rural France during the annual August shutdown. It has certainly been embraced enthusiastically by locals – and, indeed, was, more or less, a tourist-free zone. Tourists don’t normally go to Paris for the beach!

Along with the installation of sand there were umbrellas, beach huts, palm trees, sun lounges, ice creams, dancers, jugglers, free books to read. There was even a temporary swimming pool, though I didn’t try it out. Below the Pont Louis Philippe, our nearest bridge, there was a temporary bar and a series of courts for playing boules or pêtanque, traditionally the preserve of old men, but here played by all, young and old, men and women. Twice a week a honky-tonk piano and drum kit materialised and, along with the musicians, a group of ordinary folk hungry for a sing-a-long: no audition necessary, songbooks provided. This gathering flushed up some other talent too: a couple of tap dancing young women, and an older man singing scat harmoniously against the crowd (he even donated 10 euros for the privilege). There was a regular concession to les touristes (those of us who had strayed on to the beach) – a song which included several verses of “la-las”. We were very appreciative. A stone’s throw away at the town hall (L’Hôtel de Ville) there was a series of free concerts, including a lively evening of Breton (Celtic) inspired music which we loved, even though it rained.

For me, though, the experience of Paris Plages, already “a memory”, will forever be joined with the Feast of the Assumption. This feast, celebrated on 15th August, is still, in modern, secular France, a public holiday. And in Paris, whose cathedral is dedicated to Mary, Our Lady, this is a big day for the church.

The Feast of the Assumption is, of course, a challenging one for Protestants who already struggle with Mary. Pope Pius XII didn’t help by declaring Mary’s “bodily assumption” to be an infallible doctrine of the church. This is not the place to enter into the theological niceties of Marian doctrine (or the meaning of Pius’ statement), but I would say that I like much more the Orthodox Dormition of Theotokis, or at least the icon, which shows Mary’s dead body being reverenced on earth whilst simultaneously in heaven Christ nurses her soul as though she were his child. It is such a beautiful image of our own hope of resurrection.

So, with all our ambiguities about Mary, John and I set out on the Eve of the Feast of Assumption in search of the procession fluviale. There are to be two processions, where a much venerated statue of Our Lady would be taken out of the cathedral on a mini pilgrimage around her town – the first on the river (fluviale) on the Eve of the Feast and the second by foot on the following afternoon. It is a beautiful evening. It is also Saturday, so that le weekend is in full swing. A techno concert at the Hôtel de Ville is a magnet for the young. At the Pont Louis Philippe the honky tonk choir is in good voice, the boules are rolling, the beer flowing. Along the river banks (think stone, not grass here) picnics are underway. Food, wine, conversation, music. Cafés are bursting onto the streets and queues for Berthillon ice creams, the best in Paris, weave along the pavement.

Earlier in the day, the police had cleared us, and the other weekend-languid Parisians, out of a park along the Quai Saint Bernard in preparation for “an event”. We decided, later, that the procession fluviale must be starting there. So, at the advertised time, we head for the bridge nearest to it, Pont de Sully, at the southern end of the Ile Saint Louis. Here it is quieter. Just St Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, guarding the entrance to its heart. We watch some ducks flying home for the night, the slender moon rising over the Panthéon, a birthday celebration on a roof top terrace, and two musicians tossing jazz into the evening light. No sign of Mary, but no matter, we think, this is paradise. So we trace our steps back across the island. Perhaps we got it wrong. Perhaps we blinked and missed it. Perhaps she’d stowed away on a batteau mouche with the tourists. The city is positively buzzing, but no one, absolutely no one, seems to be expecting a procession. When we reach the Pont Louis Phillipe we stop for a final wistful look down the river. And there it is: the procession fluviale. A tug throwing out search light fountains and a small thread of song weaving its way up the river; and then there is Mary, dazzling, at the front of a boat full of white-robed priests. They are carrying lantern shaded candles and the song grows into a melodious chant as they pass, smiling and waving, below our feet. And incense, the fragance of incense drifts up and around us. Another barge follows, again full of candle carrying pilgrims. And another, and another, making their way toward the Ile de la Cité, circling the island home of Notre Dame. In the air the song rises from the river as though it were the bass note of the entire symphony of the city. And just two words float through the language barrier, straight to the heart: “chez nous, chez nous” . . . at home, at home.

In the scheme of the world this bass note, the umbilical chord that connects us to the source of all being, is mostly unnoticed. A week later, as we crossed Pont Louis Phillipe en route to a Saturday morning market on the Left Bank, the bulldozers were scooping up the sand. The palms and the beach huts were being loaded onto trucks. And by the end of the week Paris Plages was, once again, a road, hurling commuters along the Seine. The rentreé, as the September return of work and school and politics is called, had begun.

I’ve never much felt an affinity to the notion of the eternal city, perhaps because I am such a lover of solitude and the bush. But here in Paris, in August, it didn’t seem such a bad idea. In the heavenly Jerusalem everyone will have an apartment on the Ile Saint Louis (with a view of the river and the cathedral). Berthillon ice cream will be free. And everyone can sing around an out-of-tune piano and tap dance. There will be eternal Paris Plages, and even the Seine, fed by the crystal fountain, will invite a swim.

The bells, the bells . . .

This week I started intensive French lessons at the Alliance Française. The college is located in the 6th arrondissment not far from the Luxembourg Gardens. To get there I have two choices: take the nearest metro, Pont Marie, change at Châtelet, walk through endless underground tunnels to reach Line 4 (helpfully colour-coded deep pink), then take the train to St Placide; or, walk across Pont Louis Philippe to the Ile St Louis, across the Pont St Louis to the Ile de la Cité, past Notre Dame, along the square in front of the cathedral, past the hospital and the Police department, to the Metro station Cité, which is on Line 4 already. You can guess which route I prefer! It takes no longer, and, if I am up and organised, I can go to Mass on the way.

Coming up from the metro at St Placide, I am greeted each day by the sound of seagulls. This always surprises me – I haven’t seen them around our studio, or around the two islands in the Seine, where pigeons and sparrows seem to rule. The gulls in Europe are larger than your average Australian seagull, and their voices deeper, more resonant. When I hear them I am instantly transported to the south coast of England, to the modest home of an aunt we visited recently, which faces – across the railway and a bowling green – the Atlantic Ocean. “Next stop is the USA”, my aunt says with pride. She moved here from London on retirement, with her husband, now deceased. You can imagine them, in the first days after “the big move”, standing, facing the sea, listening in wonder to the sound of the gulls tossed high on the salty air: “How lucky are we!”

The sounds of a new place are both a source of wonder and a sign of difference, change, even, sometimes, disorientation. “How lucky are we!” were our first words as we danced around the studio, our home for the next six months, and the sounds of our first days were all new: the sirens (Ambulance? Police? Which?); the daily garbage collection; the watery swish of the street sweeper corralling endless cigarette butts, to be flushed down the drain (there is an automated flushing system along the curb); the buzz and clank of the security grill below; a distant piano, reminding us that we are living among artists; the “un, deux, trois . . . 1, 2, 3” of the dance studio across the lane; in the evening and early morning, when the volume of Paris is turned down, the low rumble of the metro, beneath us; and, of course, voices, inflections, a language that is not ours. Wonderful! On the third day, I open the windows to the street and discover that they are still speaking French – or, more accurately, not English. It is a strange and slightly weighty realisation. Another week on and our ears are better tuned. At dusk yesterday, as we are leaning on a wall inside a park at the eastern end of the Ile de Cité, we hear a series of sharp whistles, the sort your teacher blew in exasperation during a PE class. When we turn around, we see a young man walking towards us: “C’est la fermeture du square!” It is the closing of the square! (So they really do close and lock the gardens and squares at night.) We can hear and understand every word! A rare, but significant moment.

Among all the sounds that surround us, though, it is the ringing of church bells that is being woven into our day most deeply. It is surprising, in a way, to be so surrounded by churches and bells in a city also marked by the Enlightenment and by successive waves of anti-religious zeal. But the centre of Paris, and indeed the centre of France, is Notre Dame: point zero, from which all distances are measured. And Notre Dame is just the beginning. If you climb her towers, you can see church spires and domes as far as the eye can see. And you can hear them. With no effort at all we hear the bells of Notre Dame from our apartment, as well as those of St Gervais, which is just around the corner, and St Paul, near where we shop. They are all wondrously slightly out of sync: Notre Dame signals the hour just before St Gervais, and is always first with the Angelus. I spent the first few days here trying to work out the pattern of ringing. The hours are chimed only between 8 am and 10 pm, the bells remaining silent while we sleep. The angelus is rung at 8 am, 12 noon and 8 pm (At 8 to correlate with sunset I think. Does it change in winter? We shall see). And there are bells to signal that services are soon to commence: if the bells are ringing for Vespers at Notre Dame as we cross the Ile Saint Louis we will still get there on time.

What does the average Parisian think of the bells? What part do they play in the soundscape? Have they simply become wall paper? I have an awkward relationship with them. For a start I keep thinking I should be in church! When we lived next to St John’s in the centre of Canberra, the bells were, for me, mostly a call to work. There was a sort of bliss when the bells rang at 7 am on a Sunday morning and I didn’t have to appear until the 9.30 service. But there is also, for me, the deeper call to prayer. The bell that calls us to attention – that is, attention to the Divine, to that something deeper and more expansive in time and space, than the things that mostly consume our minds and our days.

There is a very beautiful painting by a nineteenth century French painter, Jean-François Millet, in the collection of the Museé D’Orsay, that was recently shown in the Australian National Gallery. Called, The Angelus, it depicts a couple of young peasants bowed in prayer in the middle of a field, newly harvested potatoes at their feet. The Museé D’Orsay website is quick to say that the painting was inspired by a childhood memory (Millet’s grandmother pausing to say the Angelus when working in the fields) and not “to glorify some religious feeling” and, after all, Millet wasn’t a churchgoer. Inexplicable this, the idea of stopping to pray!

Well, inexplicable or not, I have found myself, not reciting the Angelus, but opening the windows at 8 in the morning, as the bells clang away, and greeting the new day: “Bonjour, Le Seigneur! Bonjour!”

Bon vacances! The monks are away . . .

We arrived in Paris on 2nd August, and, as we were warned, much of Paris is on holiday. Many small boutiques and artisans have closed up shop for the summer, l’été. There are innumerable polite, hand written notes on doors and window announcing their annual holidays. The closest boulangerie, is closed for an entire month, from 17th July to 17th August. But, in a beautifully French bureaucratic way, there is clearly a system to ensure that no Parisian is deprived of their daily bread: a list of alternate local bakeries and their opening days is provided. But everyone has a right to congé annuels, annual leave. Even monks.

Our studio is just around the corner from S. Gervais, the parish church which is the foundational home of Les Fraternités de Jérusalem, a community of men and women who live out a monastic call in the midst of the city. I have, as you may know, been looking forward to joining this community in their rhythm of daily prayer. Alas! They too are enjoying congé annuels! Or the monastic equivalent: the note on their door says they are “on retreat” or “in chapter”. Their website explains: each year, the brothers and sisters of Jerusalem leave Paris for the month of August to rest and pray in the grand air. Just like the rest of Paris. How sensible. So there are no services, none at all, at S. Gervais – though the church is still open for prayer – until le chant de laudes, the singing of morning prayer, at 7 am Wednesday 1st September (note for diary . . ). However, no one need go without holy bread either. As at the boulangerie, a list the times and locations of alternate local masses is provided.

So, we are walking a leisurely ten minutes, across the Pont Louis-Phillipe and the Pont Saint-Louis, to Notre Dame for Vespers, a service of spare simplicity held in the midst of circling swarms of tourists. The first night we joined the end of the long line waiting to enter the cathedral, wondering if we would make it inside in time for the service. How often do you have to queue to get into church? It must have been much the same for your average medieval pilgrim. And, perhaps, a similar story inside the cathedral, where prayer and sightseeing coexist. Surprising as this might seem in this secular age, there are people who actually come to churches to pray. So, the pilgrim-tourists are “encouraged” through the use of moveable barriers to walk around the perimeter aisles, whilst the front of the nave is reserved for those attending services. Noisy pilgrims, average human beings, have long been a challenge for Notre Dame: in the 14th century a stone screen was built around the chancel to provide a more peaceful prayer space for the cathedral canons. It is in this cocooned space that the first of the daily Eucharists is celebrated.

At 5.45 pm a bell inside the cathedral calls us sharply to attention. The perambulating pilgrims are momentarily startled, but soon continue on their way. We stand and a trio of liturgical leaders – celebrant, reader and cantor - sweep into the sanctuary. The priest sings us into God’s presence, and then places incense into a large bowl – generous enough to rise to the heavens of this extraordinarily lofty space. Then the cantor, probably a trainee opera singer, leads us in the evening hymn, and the psalms and canticle, gently prodding us along as we join in the alternate verses. This is not performance. Our participation is expected, we are given words and music. I count it a success though if I can catch the reference for the Scripture reading, one of the few things that is not on the service sheet. No matter, because we respond with the Magnificat sung in Latin (French translation provided) while the altar and the 14th century sculpture, Our Lady of Paris, are censed and then we pray for the world, the church and (perhaps I am imagining) for all that have wandered in and out of the building on this day. I like the way the intercessions are offered by young people, in different languages. We chant the Lord’s prayer, are offered God’s blessing, and sing our farewells to the priest. It is, to use the French term for a fixed price menu, a formule. But for us right now, as we orient ourselves in this new place, such a helpful one. And in it, each evening, somewhere, in some moment we notice, God is here, in the heart of Paris.

The night stair, Furness Abbey

One of the attractive things about England, for those of us who have our ancestry here, is the immediate access to history. Walking Darwin’s circular thinking path, the Sand-walk at Down House, where he lived and worked for 40 years, where he wrote The Origin of Species, for instance. Or standing in the low roofed parlour where Wordsworth (or his sister Dorothy) wrote down the poems that he had composed while walking the fells around Grasmere. And then walking the mountains ourselves. Today we had a picnic, in the drizzle, in the ruins of Kendal Castle. Two pink clad girls were clambering up and down the walls, up to the great hall, down to the cellars, oblivious of both history and safety warnings. It’s an adventure playground, part of their landscape, nothing special. Ruined castles are a dime a dozen, as are ruined abbeys. In fact I played in one as a young girl, at Bury St Edmonds.

Unlike the slow demise of the castles though, the ruin of the abbeys was historically dramatic. Between 1536 and 1541 Henry VIII dissolved over 800 monasteries in England and Wales. Most were physically destroyed: burnt first, to extract valuable lead from roofs and plumbing; stone and slate removed and recycled in new buildings; furnishings sold; tombs plundered; precious metals melted down; relics destroyed. Their libraries were simply lost. The history is complex of course, and corruption and decline at least part of the story, but having been immersed in the study of Christian monasticism over the last couple of years I find this “No” of the English church to the monastic way of life somewhat confronting! (In France the story is different, but no less torrid.) The dissolution of the monasteries reshaped the landscape of Christianity in England: it is as if the abbey ruins are scattered across the land to remind us of a wrong turn, and how the Reformation put us spiritually back on track. More cynically, they are a reminder of how Henry broke the power of the church, and helped put us on the road toward a secular state.

In the end I find the ruined monasteries sad. Christianity becomes a lonelier project I think, with the solitary village parson tending his little flock. Did Thomas Cranmer really imagine his transformed monastic offices, morning and evening prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, would be prayed together, daily in parishes? In human-sized communities of encouragement and support? Perhaps this is why a “new monasticism” just might be worth a thought.

• For Darwin’s house see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/the-home-of-charles-darwin-down-house/.


• The Wordsworth Trust runs a wonderful programme from Dove House - http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/index.asp . We managed to get restricted view tickets (behind a church pillar!) to a reading by British poet Simon Armitage.


• Furness Abbey, a Cistercian house, was the first of the large monasteries to surrender to Henry VIII. The monastery had taken part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a mass protest movement that began in York in 1536: surrender was an expedient alternative to trial for treason. Other resistant abbots were executed. http://cistercians.shef.ac.uk/abbeys/furness.php .

Not Paris, a drain pipe.

I am not in Paris, yet. We have been in England now for two weeks: a few days in London, then the New Monasticism conference at Douai Abbey, near Reading, and now we are mid-way through our stay in the Lake District. Stunning country, though we are somewhat ill-equipped. Wellington boots, or at least waterproof shoes, would be helpful. It has become wetter by the day, so that the babbling brook next to Alyson’s flat has paced up several notches to “swiftly flowing stream”. No wonder the towns are full of adventure clothing stores – southerners, and other idiot visitors like us, arrive imagining that it will be possible to stroll up the hills with joggers and a fold up umbrella. Not so. John has plans for a serious walk or two. We shall see.

Being in England is, for me, a strangely disorienting experience. It is only the third time I have returned since my family migrated to Australia in 1966 (ah, how Prime Minister Gillard has wonderfully erased the stigma of being a Ten Pound Pom!). This always seems a ridiculous admission to make, in an age where international travel has become, well, so ordinary. Already my children have travelled further, lived overseas.

The disorientation comes, I think, from the layering of time and space. When I visit, it is not just a matter of leaving one space, one corner of the globe, and landing on another, which happens to be “on the other side of the world”. The distance is still a distance that you feel as the plane grinds its way around the surface of the earth. But it is time that disorients. First, there is the adjustment of one’s body clock, as, in traversing the surface of the world, you have also been winding back through time, chasing the sun to its rising.

But for me, it is time on a larger, if human, scale that refuses to behave. So I walk down my Grandmother’s street for only the third time since 1966. Then, it was full of grandmothers – the folk who had lived there since the war, through the war – the mothers of my mother and her school friends. I was a country girl then, and a visit to my grandparents’ pre-war terrace on the southern fringe of London was already another world. My grandmother would open the door, bend down and hug us tightly: “Hello my dears”. The wooden door is gone now, replaced by a double locking security one. Gone too the wooden windows, the stained glass panel, and, indeed, the low front hedge and gate. Front gardens abandoned, the street is now strewn with cars, parked within inches of doors and windows. But under my feet the crazy paving, laid perhaps in the 1930s by my grandfather, a proud new houseowner, is still there. In the back garden the same red, square paving stones form the path to the garage where the London cab, the source of the family livelihood, was preened and polished. Looking back to the house I can see the drain pipe snaking up the pebble-dashed wall, its most prominent and persistent feature, now painted a vivid blue. It appears in photographs from the first few weeks of my life: my mother had returned to her childhood home for my birth; my father, a sailor, was in Western Australia for the Montebello nuclear tests. So this was my first home.

As I walk around the house I bump relentlessly through time. I am tucked up in the box room with the bed covers pulled so tightly the mattress becomes a boat. Not sleeping, I am watching the pull light switch dangling over my auntie’s bed, still. I wake early one dark winter morning, on a low z-bed next to the gas hearth (was it ever so small?), to unpack the stocking filled in the night by Father Christmas. I switch on the light under-the-stairs: a musty cave where, I knew, my grandmother, mother and aunt, had sheltered during the blitz because the backyard bomb shelter was always full of water.

There is nothing special about such memories of course. But it is their remoteness from the life that I have had that sends my head into a spin. My aunt still lives in this house, the house of all her life. She accompanied my grandparents through their old age to their final illnesses. She has lived the changes: the invasion of the car; the first coloured neighbours; the loft conversions; the demolition of the pub (it proprietors embroiled in illegal drugs); the rise of the supermarket and the demise of the local shops.

For me, there is a more dramatic end. And I was surprised last week to find it flushed up as a story of my family’s departure. “My Mum said she would never forget the look on your face as you turned and waved goodbye.” This was the daughter of my Auntie Mabel, my grandfather’s sister. Heathrow in 1966, a door, an exit. Once that moment was closed I would never again see my Auntie Mabel, my Uncle Hugh, or my grandparents. At ten I knew the weight of the door. My relatives still refer to Australia as “out” or “over there”. Entirely other, unthinkably other. Why would you go “out there”? Why would you live “over there”? It was my father’s scheme, my mother the dutiful wife. So the story goes.

Every time I come here (all three times!) I cannot remember who I am. There is, laid out before me, an alternate life of Englishness. I look English, I find, though my skin in more weathered now. But that is it really. This place does not want or need me. After all, we left. Which leaves me wandering in a not quite alien landscape, constantly looking for bearings. I am grateful, this time, for the lifeline of email, keeping my home “out there” in view. Steadying. Reassuring. And I am grateful for God, for the transcendence of time and place that God is. My own smallness, limitedness, my shocking contingency, is here something less to be mourned than something to be held more lightly. Dust. Grass withering. And in the larger scene, if one drifts up a little higher and considers the small earth spinning in the “universe of wonders”, this is no bad thing.