A certain symmetry has presented itself in our last few days in Paris. The nuns and monks next door at St Gervais have departed and there will be no daily liturgies this week. In August they were away, with the rest of Paris, . en vacancesThis time they are going away for their annual retreat “in the heart of winter”. We discovered this by chance (or providence!) on their website, when checking to see if Vespers was being celebrated on Sunday night. So we were able to sing and chant with them for one last time, until a hoped for return one day. So, adieu friends, à la prochaine.
Yesterday too was our last Sunday morning at the American Cathedral. I sat alongside John in just about the same spot we sat on our first visit in August. Then we had felt an immediate sense of welcome, now nearly six months later I am tearful because we are leaving people that we have come to love and a place that has provided an anchor in the sea of delightful challenges that is Paris. “The city of lights” is a phrase that will always echo with the Dean’s gentle warmth and with the light that the Cathedral community added to our Paris sojourn. And it was a real blessing yesterday when it was Zachary, the Dean, who proclaimed the very last words of the liturgy, which encourage us to return to the world refreshed by our feast of “word and sacrament”, finishing with a duo of Alleluias. We respond: Thanks be to God, Alleluia, Alleluia.
Vespers, with the soon to depart monastic community, ended in almost exactly the same way, so that the very last words we sing with our brothers and sister of the Fraternities of Jerusalem are Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.
There have been many Alleluias in this last week. The morning star in the east and the moon setting over the Seine as I walked to early mass. Lunch with the good company of two Australian friends from the Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. The sweetness of langoustine. The richness of crème brulée. The mob Sunday afternoon roller bladers swarming over Pont Alma. The long walk home through the Tuileries in the grisalle, the greyness of the afternoon. A man taming the birds. Buskers adding the sound track to the film of our lives. Then there is quiet last supper with our Swiss friends at Lutetia, our “local” on the Ile St Louis, and the nearly-sixty party for Naomi who is celebrating, eating life as she fights cancer. The party is held in the extra-large third floor studio she and Andrew are sharing this month, an unexpected gift with Paris lined up to view: the Seine, the Iles, Notre Dame, St Chapelle, the flash of the Eiffel Tower, the floodlights of the Bateaux Mouches. The constant flash and hum of traffic, the bli-blip of the Sapiers, the occasional siren, remind us that this city is not just history, but peopled with folk more or less like us.
As we party happily on, I watch a man fishing in the clothes bin below with a long and shiny metal hook. Success! He examines the catch, stows a coat in his plastic carry bag and continues on his way. Then I think of a Sunday, long ago, in a far away town by the Pacific Ocean and the street friend who embellished the end of our liturgy with his own flourish of enthusiasm: Alleluia, Alleluia, bum!
Time to head home.
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