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.