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We are still in Eastertide in the Church Year.  It is a season of new life, resurrection, and hope, and as I gaze out my window at the blue bird darting among the branches of our olive tree in full leaf and flower, I wonder at the cold temperatures we are experiencing at this time of year.  Nature has a way of surprising us.

But the Church Year is certain with no surprises, the progression from Advent to Christmas, Lent to Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, the long summer and fall of Trinity, the return to Advent.  Through this liturgy of church seasons we sing of God’s love for us, his constant watching and caring.  He pulls us through our own time and into his, through his Body, the Church.  He is constant and steady, an unfailing lover.

Our Diocesan Synod met this week, and it was good to be with fellow Anglicans from other states, other parishes.  It was so good to see old friends and make new ones, to hear how God had worked miracles in their lives.  It was good to share meals, worship together in the Mass, and conduct the business of the Diocese with reports and plans for the future.  We also were nourished in soul by Father Seraphim Hicks from Nazareth House Apostolate, who spoke to us on prayer, our walk with God, our communion with God.  The Anglican Province of Christ the King has been blessed with many Godly clergy and parishioners, and this yearly meeting is a time of encouragement within the Body of Christ.

So in this cold Eastertide, we, like Mary Magdalene in the garden on that Easter morning, reach for the resurrected Christ through his body on earth. We want to touch God, to warm our hearts, and we do so through the greatest prayer of all, the Eucharist.  And it is through the Church that the Eucharist is effected, this mysterious presence of Christ in the bread and the wine.  It is through the Church that we touch Christ in the garden of his tomb.  We become like Mary Magdalene, as we meet Our Lord in the Mass. And in this meeting we know him.

As we worshiped this morning at Saint Peter’s I thought of the many I love who I saw in the last few days at the Synod.  I thought how the Eucharist wove us together, that the supper instituted by Christ on Maundy Thursday so many years ago, today continued to pull us together like those leaves on the branches outside my window.  We flowered together from the same vine, in full green leaf, like my olive tree outside, and the Holy Spirit moved among us just like the bird, encouraging us, urging us with his song.  At the solemn Pontifical Mass on Saturday, thirty robed priests, led by the thurifer, torchbearers and crucifix, processed down the red carpet of Saint Peter’s and we sang as though with one voice, “Alleluia, sing to Jesus…”  Last in line came our Archbishop with his shepherd’s staff.  Through the shepherding, through the prayers, through the action of God through his Church, we were one.

This morning we again touched Christ in the Eucharist, full flower in our sanctuary.  Then we gathered together in the fellowship hall to celebrate a baby soon to join us, a new member of our flock.  Soon there will be a baptism to sing about, and another leaf on our green tree of life growing through time and space, nourished by Christ.

I have not played the piano in many years.

Even when I did play the piano the effort was not terribly successful.  I took lessons as a child and knew the notes and the keys and the finger positions, but making it all come together quickly enough to recognize the tune was a challenge.  I never reached this enviable level of skill, but even so, the miracle of touching those white keys and hearing the notes is something I shall never forget.  I do admire and, I must admit, also envy, those who can really play, those who can play so that others can sing.

So when I entered the Children’s Chapel at church this morning without a plan for the hymn we were singing (I was a substitute teacher) I was a bit lost.  Could I lead a cappella?  Possible but not desirable.  Yet soon, with the help of one of our bright and sympathetic students, I opened the Hymnal to #311, All Things Bright and Beautiful, set the book carefully on the stand before me, and placed my fingers on the keys.  I saw right away that my left hand fingers would be useless with those chords hovering in the base clef.  I lowered my expectations and worked with my right hand fingers on the single melody that, I prayed, would somehow be coerced from the large wooden instrument before me.

The first note was such a delight!  I wanted to pinch myself, I was so triumphant.  Then the second note, the third, and I was moving along fine one note at a time until I hit a sharp, one of those nasty black keys.  I remembered flats and sharps, those bumps in the road you had to watch out for and be prepared to battle.  I tried from the beginning again.  Darn that F-sharp.  Again.  This time I did it, and my fingers tumbled over the keys, including the long black sharp.  We all laughed at my huge success, a laughter that soon turned to hysterics as we tried to pull ourselves together to sing the chorus.  And we did!

As I considered my time this last week and what struck me as the most wonderful, I thought of those moments in the Children’s Chapel.  We sang the chorus and read and prayed the Service of Morning Prayer together, kneeling before the magnificent carved wooden altar with the flaming candles.  We prayed the prayer of the day, the Collect, and then the Lord’s Prayer, then Psalm 100, then said the Apostles’ Creed.

It wasn’t that my week didn’t go well.  It was a good week, a fantastic week, in many ways.  I made great headway on my novel-in-progress, The Magdalene Melody, for I received valuable advice from a Cambridge Magdalene scholar I had queried for help.  He sent me, God bless him, nine pages of suggestions, including help with French expressions, and even Latin translations.  I was in writing heaven as I applied this material to the manuscript.  The week was also full of preparations for our upcoming Diocesan Synod, preparations that seem fragmenting at best for there are so many things to do, but still so very gratifying when accomplished.  Then at the end of the week I learned my fourth novel, Hana-lani, had won an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival.  Such a surprise!  I raced to email my readers.  It was a good week, an incredible week.

Yet the Children’s Chapel trumped it all, and looking back to this morning, I think it was the profound experience of not fully seeing, but still doing and listening.  It was having faith in the unseen, faith in what I knew to be true about that piano.  I knew I needed to push down the white key, but I couldn’t see the hammer hit the cord deep inside.  I knew I had to follow the notes on the page, this language of music.  The note I saw, that little black dot, was the sign for one of the keys, and my brain had to tell my finger which key it was.

The process was not unlike our reach for God.  We reach for and touch God in the Sacraments he has given us.  We cannot see him, but we follow the notes he has given us in his Law, his Creed, his Scriptures, his Church, his Family, the Body of Christ.  We follow, not blindly, for we can see partially.  We can see how it all makes sense – the claims of Christ, his life, death, and resurrection, the immense love of God for each of us.  We follow these love notes he sends us through time, each yesterday, each today, each tomorrow, using our reason and our feelings, our head and our heart.  As we read the notes we learn to live our faith, we learn from experience.  Just as we put our fingers on the keys, we love and worship and say our daily prayers.  We learn to read the notes of God, and we get better each day.  Like any human endeavor, this life of joy gets easier with practice.

I placed my finger on the white ivory bar and heard a sound fill the chapel.  In the same way, each day I place my life in God’s hands, doing what needs doing, praying Thy will be done.  Then I wait and I listen for the music.

The Friday wedding of Kate and William on the Feast of St. Catherine of Siena was historic and grand and full of hopeful portent.

The next few days of that same weekend were even more so, and as I look back on this week of news flashing across my screens with events nearly too significant, almost too sudden, one upon the other, to fully absorb, I became immensely grateful for Good Shepherd Sunday, today, the Second Sunday after Easter.  For today made sense of it all.

Pope John Paul II, a shepherd of his sheep, huge in his love for the world and each person in it, was appropriately beatified on Sunday, May 1, known as Divine Mercy Sunday.  He was, to be sure, full of Christ’s divine mercy, full of God’s love.  Many scenes of his life and work come to mind, but perhaps the most powerful was his meeting in the jail cell with the man who had attempted to martyr him.  The Pope visited this man to forgive him and share with him the divine mercy of God.  John Paul lived on, battling Parkinson’s disease silently and with grace.  He showed the world the face of love.

May is the month of Mary, to whom this pope was devoted, and whose image one sees throughout Rome, frescoed on walls, brought in from the streets to holy altars where the faithful venerate the mother of Christ and receive her comfort.  Of all the many miraculous Madonnas in Rome, the one most revered and most ancient is the Salus Populi Romani (Protector of the Roman People).  The icon is reputed to be painted by St. Luke, is dated to the first century, and hangs high over a gilded altar in the north transept of Maria Maggiore.  The Madonna has led sacred processions through Rome as the people prayed for the ending of plagues, the ending of wars.  On the night of April 30, 2011, a solemn vigil in the Circus Maximus was held.  In the torchlight, the Lukan Madonna was processed to her shrine and venerated, as the faithful prepared for the beatification of John Paul the following day.

John Paul II preached peace and an end to terrorism, which, as many of us believe, may have to be ended through unpeaceful means.  The attack in New York nearly ten years ago changed our world, for it was an attack on the freedom to believe, to speak out, to assemble.  It was an attack on our hopes for peaceful ways and means.  It was an invitation, if not a command, to war.

On the day of the Pope’s beatification the leading terrorist of our world was found and killed.  What does it mean that this man, the symbol of all terror, this architect of horror, was found and killed on this day?  A coincidence some say, and perhaps they are right.  But history has an amazing way of unfolding and sometimes such coincidence seems too difficult to believe.

As we drove to church this cold spring morning, I held two parallel sequences in my mind.  One, the planning, arrival, attack, and thirty minute run through the three story house where this terrorist was hiding, then his death.  The other, the singing, the processions, the beatification of a saint, his glory in Christ.  Both sequences were and are historic forces.  One force for hate, one force for love.  One for chains, one for freedom.  One for evil, one for good.  The terrorist met his maker that day – did he meet divine mercy in his judgment?  The saint looked upon us from Heaven as we honored his love for us – did he smile in his tears for each person?

One of the delightful and comforting things about being a Christian is that we don’t have to answer these questions.  We simply watch history unfold.  We watch God act through and in our time.  We wonder, we marvel, and we smile.  We say our prayers and we worship together in our churches as Christ’s body.  We partake of God.  When we do these things, our world makes sense.

And so we sang in church this morning, The King of love my shepherd is, Whose goodness faileth never; I nothing lack if I am his, And he is mine forever…, based on the Twenty-third Psalm, and considered the immense love of God in Christ our Good Shepherd.  As we sang, this entire week – the wedding, the beatification, the death of this evil one – wove together in some kind of answer.  I knew this Good Shepherd would care for his sheep.  I knew he would not let me go.  He would find me, no matter how lost I was, and bring me home, for he is the Shepherd of Divine Mercy.

Shortly after the great festival of Easter 2011, on April 29, the Feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, Katherine Middleton married Prince William.  The world watched, pulled together into truth and beauty.

It is interesting that fourteenth-century Catherine of Siena was such a political saint, advising popes and monarchs, bringing the pope home to Rome from the Avignon exile.  A third order Anchorite, her cell was her bedroom at her home in Siena.  She nursed the victims of plague and sent letters to pontiffs.  Towards the end of her short life she received the stigmata in Pisa, hidden wounds that bled internally.  She died in Rome, and you can see today her rooms in the convent attached to Santa Maria sopra Minerva, an exquisite Christian basilica built over an earlier shrine to Minerva. She was sacrificial.  She saw clearly.

As I watched Katherine Middleton and her father step solemnly up the red-carpeted aisle of Westminster Abbey I wondered how much she considered the other Catherine.  This Katherine, of the Middle-Town, a commoner, would also have a political role to play.  She may one day be Queen of England.  She began her part splendidly as she took part in this national and holy liturgy, as she walked toward the ancient altar with poise and graceful restraint.

Liturgy, ceremony, tradition, is an outward expression of the truth of what and who we are meant to be.  It is the way we act out our belief in our better selves, our ideals, our hopes and dreams as a culture.  In the dance of liturgy we show a graceful restraint, controlling our impulses, as we follow the tune, stepping together, creating otherworldly beauty.  Today in our world we see marriages fail, families fall apart.  We see broken promises.  We see heartache, cynicism, despair.  Sometimes our world seems on the verge of collapsing.

But in this abbey wedding we were renewed and given hope.  In this ceremony a man and a woman made promises to love one another in sickness and in health, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance.  The Church blessed their union.  The country witnessed and were part of this dance in this moment of history.  Because it was large – in pageantry, in beauty, in careful attention, in its worldwide audience – and because it was also intimate through the miracles of television, the wedding of Katherine and William renewed all of our vows.  We said yes, we can be better too, our culture can be better, we can still hold claim to these ideals.

The Bishop of London preached a profound sermon.  He began with the words of the other Catherine, of Siena: “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”  Shakespeare echoed this two hundred years later, but Catherine also spoke of the holy, who God means for us to be.  It is this identity that liturgy provides.  It tells us, reminds us, who we are, calling us to set the world on fire by seeking God’s will for us, who we are meant to be.

The bishop also spoke of generosity and love, the generous love involved in the marriage promises.  Our modern culture tells us not to be generous, to acquire and keep, steal and hide.  It claims that the self comes first, others second, if at all.  Generous love, as the bishop said, demands sacrifice of self, allowing what is best for the other to flower.  He spoke of the great lie that has replaced belief in God, that we can find our happiness in another person.  We make impossible demands and when we fail and do not forgive, we divorce.  These are not popular words today, yet we were reminded, there under the abbey’s soaring wings of stone, that we are called to renew this ideal.  And as we listened the words rang true.

The Christian knows we can only find our happiness in God. Thus God through the Church blesses marriage, sanctifying the union with the power of the Holy Spirit, encouraging true love, true sacrifice, true forgiveness.  Through marriage and family these ideals renew our culture, generation by generation.

Katherine and William made their promises before the high altar of this historic eleventh-century abbey.  Founded by Edward the Confessor, an English King sainted for his humility and charity, the abbey has long cradled the graves of the great through the centuries – poets, statesmen, kings and queens.  I smiled as I saw the couple process to the south ambulatory where they signed their wedding papers over the tomb of Edward the Confessor.  They seemed to understand the importance of these public moments.

The words of the service came from the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer.  The hymns were hymns sung for centuries in parish churches and grand cathedrals throughout England. This wedding wove the past into the present, and in doing so allowed all of us to feel part of something greater, to see our better selves, to see the good in Western civilization.  We saw that what was true yesterday was true today and, with this ceremony that bound us together, would be true tomorrow.

We celebrate with William and Katherine, with England, with all Christian cultures, these ideals of love and sacrifice, of God’s sacramental care for his creation through marriage and family.  We celebrate honor and truth and beauty and giving to one another.  Through liturgy, through pageantry, through ceremony and tradition, through these public dances of faith and love, we reach for God.

Easter Sunday is the holiest day of the Christian Year.  Everything leads to it and everything comes from it. It is a day of reliving our story of salvation and in doing so being resurrected anew.

Here in the Bay Area the cold gray skies do not encourage us to think of spring, but today in the late afternoon the sun burst forth as though in a final victory.  Winter is indeed passing, going home to its dark days.  The rich green hills, the flowering plum trees, the light lingering longer into the early evening, all give us signs of this transformation.

Just so we slipped from the darkness of Lent and entered the light of Easter’s Resurrection Sunday.  This past Holy Week we walked Christ’s way of the cross in Jerusalem.  Thursday we celebrated the Lord’s Supper and the great gift of his presence in the Eucharist, then watched breathlessly as the altar and chancel were stripped of their furnishings, the Blessed Sacrament removed as well, the church left silent, dark.  We prayed with Christ in the garden, keeping watch before the Altar of Repose with its flaming candles.  We faced his trial and his suffering as he carried his cross to Golgotha, the place of the skull.  We stood with Mary, his mother, the young steadfast John, and the devoted Magdalene, at the foot of his cross.  We heard his words of forgiveness and saw him breathe his last.

This is the catholic way, to live the story of our salvation.  So that three days after that Good Friday, with him we rise from the dead.  We cry Alleluia, Christ our Lord is risen today!  Our triumpant holy day!  And with him, we know, we will rise too.

This morning I checked on the children in the Sunday School where they gathered, placing cut flowers in baskets brought from home and gardens, then I returned to the hushed nave of the church.  The sanctuary was all whites, the altar covered in lilies.  Candles burned brightly and light streamed from the high windows, bathing the chancel.  Soon the thick white Easter Cross with its deeply bored holes was carried to the head of the central aisle.  The children processed up the red-carpeted aisle, carrying their flowers, as the people sang.  When they reached the white cross they shoved the stems into the deep holes.  Soon the white beams were covered in reds and yellows and greens and pinks and blues, a floral rainbow. The dark deep holes were no more, only beds for those bursting blossoms of color.

And so, I thought later, as I moved through my day of family gathering, our humanity is realized once again.  The story of who we are, children of God, now redeemed, is told.  Again and again, we emerge from the dark, we correct our wrong turns, we are sorry, we repent.  Again and again, we embrace the light and set out anew.  We walk our own way of the cross, know our own sufferings as we journey through life.  I studied each face at my dinner table this afternoon, each etched with a past and each looking to his or her future.  I knew that we could still choose that future, choose the mapping, as we came to each crossroads of choice, each moment of each hour of each day of each week.  We may not choose wisely or selflessly.  We may not be brave or kind.  We may not simply love enough.

But with the help of God we will recognize the darkness and we will turn toward the light.  We will emerge from our tombs and be reborn, again and again, until finally, we find ourselves in Paradise.  Until finally, we find ourselves truly resurrected.

Deo Gratias. Alleluia.

The drama played out on Palm Sunday in a liturgical church is a colorful one full of meaning and portent, for this is the Sunday we tell the story of Christ riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.  He rides into the Holy City as a king, but on a humble beast of burden.  He soon will become that beast of burden, as he meets his death, a humbling and painful one, and carries our wrong turns, our sins, with him to the Cross.

These thoughts mingled with my memories of our recent time in London and Paris.  Driving to Saint Peter’s on this warm spring day, I gave thanks for our safe return home and thanks for the many blessings of the trip – worshiping with fellow Anglicans at St. Stephen’s and All Saints in London, and visiting the glorious sanctuaries in Paris, the Miraculous Medal, Sacre-Coeur, La Madeleine, Saint-Eustache.  I shall never forget the singing of the Sisters and Brothers at Saint-Gervais and the Veneration of the Crown of Thorns at Notre-Dame.  The high waters of the Thames and the Seine rolled under bridges and along embankment walkways.  Trees flowered, sending pollen into the cool air.  Beds of red tulips looked up from the earth in Hyde Park and the Tuileries.  The cities thawed as spring began to spring.  Hope was in the air, teasing us with sporadic sunshine that would warm our cool skin.

I carried these images with me as we drove through our own greened hills and slowly let them go, to slip into and form my past. I looked forward to church.  Today would be a glorious day, the day of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.  It was a day when the children of the Sunday School would help lead the procession of palms.  As I sat with the children in the front row, waiting for the palms to be blessed and handed out, the old excitement returned, that of taking part in a great drama, a drama not only meaningful to me, but also to the world, to mankind.  For Christ’s humble entry, the children waving palm branches in welcome, says it all – we too must ride the humble donkey, we too must have the eyes of children to recognize Our Lord and to understand with head and heart these momentous events of Holy Week.  In this portentous week we renew our belief in the truth of God’s actions among men. We make sense of our lives and of our world.

We received our palms and joined the procession behind the draped crucifix, the torchbearers, the thurifer, the clergy.  We waved our palms high and sang All glory laud and honor/To Thee, Redeemer, King/To Whom the lips of children/Made sweet hosannas ring as the organ boomed. The congregation followed, and we processed around the church, the side aisles, the central aisle, returning to our pew.  The children and teachers then left for the Children’s Chapel and their own liturgy and lesson.

As we entered the narthex I glanced back through the open doors to the chancel and sanctuary.  The altar, the candlesticks, the crucifix, even the Madonna and Child, were draped in purple.  Immense palm branches arched up the sides of the altar.  The space was all purples and greens and reds, with the tabernacle tented in red, the carpet red, the apse a soft red brick.  The covered purple images, wreathed in greens, said, pay attention!  They said, wait and watch, fast and pray, and live out the story of your salvation, of your new birth into spring. I knew that churches throughout the world had draped their crucifixes as we had done on this day.  I knew faithful folks were waiting and watching, fasting and praying.  I knew we were one, the Body of Christ, the Church, as we lived our momentous story of salvation this Holy Week in the Year of Our Lord 2011.

So this morning we welcomed Christ into our midst, waving our palms in greeting.  Now we begin the amazing journey to the Cross and to our own Resurrections.

I had forgotten how lovely their singing is.

The temperatures have dropped suddenly here in Paris, from warm, balmy, sunny seventies, to cold, biting, windy fifties.  We wrapped ourselves in our wool scarves and gloves and set out for Saint-Gervais-Protais, a seventeenth-century Flamboyant Gothic church of white stone and stained glass.

Located on the Right Bank across the Seine from Notre-Dame, the sixth-century church was dedicated to the first-century Roman martyrs Gervais and Protais, whose relics were brought to Paris by St. Germain.

Today, St. Gervais-Protais is home to the Brothers and Sisters of Jerusalem, an order serving the local community.  Founded in 1975 by Fr. Pierre-Marie Delfieux and Cardinal Francois Marty, the order seeks to bring the contemplative spirituality of the desert into the heart of the city, particularly for the working populace.  Monks and nuns hold part-time jobs in the secular world, but sing the morning, noon, and evening offices in the church.  A daily Mass is offered.  They follow rules of love, prayer, work, hospitality, and silence as well the traditional ones – chastity, obedience, and poverty.

Today we entered the nave of white stone columns and took seats on low wooden stools.  The Sisters and Brothers had already taken their places in the chancel, kneeling in their flowing white robes.  The figures blended into the white space, unobtrusive, so that my eye was naturally drawn to the colorful Christ icon placed at the center of the white marble altar. Above the image, rose a gilded crucifix, framed by six tall golden candlesticks.  The white columns of the ambulatory curved behind the altar, and between the columns I glimpsed the glimmering reds and blues of stained glass in the apsidal chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.  The white columns rose higher to stained glass that caught and transformed the outer light, and beyond, the stained glass touched the fanned vaults.  The verticality of the space, the brilliant glimmering colors splashing the creamy white stone, filled me with happiness.

And then these white-robed monks and nuns, facing the altar,rising and kneeling and rising, began to sing the Psalms of the noon office in French.

Their voices soared between the columns and high into the vaults, and for this short midday service of prayers and lessons, peace came upon us, those fortunate enough to be there or perhaps careful enough to take the time.  I gave thanks for the witness of this desert community in the heart of Paris.

It is one of the most beautiful experiences in this Cty of Light.

Sts-Gervais-et-Protais, The Monastic Communities of Jerusalem
13, rue des Barres, Paris
Open daily; Tuesday – Saturday: Morning Prayer 7 a.m. (Saturday 8 a.m.); Midday Prayer 12:30; Evening Prayer and Mass 6 p.m.; Sunday: Office of the Resurrection 8 a.m., Mass 11 a.m.
All services preceded by 30 minutes of silent prayer and adoration.  No public liturgies are offered on Mondays, but the church is open.

We visited the historic Shakespeare and Co. bookshop on the Left Bank.  The cherry trees in front of the two story shop occupying the lower floors of a townhouse were in full bloom branching over used stacked used books and benches for reading.  The store is across the River Seine from Notre-Dame Cathedral, two venerable institutions presiding, I like to think, in a complimentary fashion.  The mind and heart and spirit are integrally linked, woven together, and it is only in the last century that the creed of self has pushed to marginalize the creed of God.

As I looked at the two buildings, clearly Notre-Dame, in its twin-towered gothic splendor won the prize for age, size, architecture.  And clearly the massive crowds stood in the forecourt of the cathedral, not the bookstore.

But I was glad to visit the folksy Shakespeare and Co. and place my copies of Offerings in the capable hands of one of the young clerks.  I found the single copy of this novel set in France (and Paris) that remained in the store, wedged between Pilgrimage (Italy) and Inheritance (England), high over a doorway, so that the Trilogy formed a lintel blessing browsers as they passed below.  Not a prominent location, but it was properly in the S section of fiction, and could be reached by a very tall person.

I took numerous photos of the many rooms with their nooks and crannies and narrow stairs and clever quotes and signs and old photos and stacks of books.  Long an English bookstore here in Paris, the store goes in many ways back to the 1920’s, even earlier with the artist communities here, although the present location, and owner, dates to post war years.  Booklovers don’t want to miss a visit to Shakespeare and Co., a true delight.

And no-one should miss Notre-Dame Cathedral, the seat of the Archbishop of Paris, across the bridge, over eight hundred years old.

St. Germain of Paris built the first church complex here on the Île de la Cité in the sixth century, which included Notre-Dame, St. John, and St. Etienne.  In 1163, Louis VII and Bishop Sully began construction of a new cathedral and Louis IX, Saint Louis, completed the church a century later, adding the Hôtel-Dieu, a hospital for the poor.  When Louis returned from Jerusalem with the Crown of Thorns, he housed the precious relic in Notre-Dame until Ste-Chapelle was completed specifically for the Crown.  The relic has since been returned to Notre-Dame for safekeeping and veneration.

We entered the church through one of the the stunning carved portals, and found seats in the nave for the Lenten Friday afternoon service, the Veneration of the Crown of Thorns.  Each Friday in Lent and all day Good Friday, the Crown of Thorns, encased in glass, is shown to the faithful.  Catholic Christians see this as a way to act out their beliefs, to allow the body to reflect the soul.

Folks say that the British know how to put on a show with affairs of state, weddings, processions, etc., using full regalia, carriages, flags, sometimes mounted police. I would say that  French Catholics do the same.  To be sure, any parade acts in the same way – civic parades such as the Fourth of July unite patriotic fervor and assent.  They are useful and necessary cultural tools, uniting the people.  Just so the Church has for two thousand years acted out the creed of Christ – his birth at Christmas, his death and resurrection at Easter, his presence in the Eucharist at Corpus Christi.  Many other processions and festivals mark the liturgical year in Catholic cultures, and these pull communities together in a powerful way.  They also give the individual a way to live out something larger, the Body of Christ, his internalized beliefs becoming externalized and made real in another dimension.

So I was looking forward to the Veneration of the Crown of Thorns.  By three o’clock the massive nave of Notre-Dame was full.  The gothic windows in the far apse glimmered in reds and blues, and I could see part of the historic chancel under the modern golden cross.  The main altar in the center of the transept held red roses and an icon of Christ. A large sculpture of Our Lady, the crowned Madonna of Notre-Dame, looked on from the right.

Bells rang, echoing through the soaring vaults.  We could see the procession moving from the sacristy in the south aisle to the foot of the nave, then up the central aisle.  Clergy and laymen in white robes, women in black veils, led the way, and the torchbearers stepped seriously before the crucifix raised high.  Then came the Crown of Thorns, and I smiled.  The glass sphere was carried on an ark like structure with poles just as the People of Israel had used with their early tabernacles, the Holy of Holies.  The circle of glass could barely be seen for it had been set in a large golden crown, ornate and ornamented.  I thought that this was a nice touch, the humble woven reeds and thorns forming Christ the Crucified’s crown were now in their proper setting, the gilded crown of Christ the King.  The procession moved slowly and triumphantly up the aisle, a serious dance reflecting the ignoble death of Christ, as the people sang with feeling.  When the procession reached the altar, the Crown of Thorns was removed from the golden crown and placed beneath the image of Christ. As in most liturgical worship, the matter of suffering was transformed into the matter of glory.

When it was time for the veneration, each row emptied orderly and quietly into the center aisle, and we followed the line to the altar.  In turn, each of us kissed the glass that held that crown of Christ’s ordeal.  As my turn came and I knelt to kiss the crown, I was glad to be part of this liturgy.  I was glad to join these other faithful in this public statement of belief in God’s redeeming action of the Cross, a statement both glorious and intimate.  I was humbled, and was grateful for the gift of liturgy, of sacramental, material ways to speak of the holy and spiritual.  Ours was not a silent faith.  We had something to say, something important to witness to.

As we left the great stone church we moved to the far side of the parvis to take photos of the lovely façade.  On this sunny afternoon in Lent, I glanced across the Seine and thought of Shakespeare who was a religious man who used words to reveal things unseen.  The little store named after him across the Seine so crammed with words offered a similar miracle, trying to show through this artistic medium man’s yearnings, hopes, and dreams, to ask the great questions of our culture: what is love, goodness, truth?

And here in this great cathedral man yearned, hoped and dreamed as well, only here there seemed to be more answers to those burning questions.

http://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/; http://www.cathedraldeparis.com/

The morning was warm and sunny, a perfect day to taxi to the top of Montmartre to visit the stunning multi-domed Romanesque church of Sacré-Coeur.  Winding through the neighborhoods so layered with art history, religious history, and political ferment, I recalled that here on these slopes Ignatius Loyola assembled his first group of followers, searching for the best way to seek the will of God, and creating the Spiritual Exercises.  Here also the Revolution of 1789, in their hatred of the Church, martyred nuns and abbesses.  Then in the late nineteenth century, after years of bloodshed throughout France, revolution after revolution, Parisians built a white basilica of peace.  It was to be a sanctuary of perpetual prayer and adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, exposed in a golden monstrance.  Nuns would pray continually for peace, peace between nations, peace between men.  They called the church the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the sacred heart of love.

Sacré-Coeur rose from Montmartre, the Roman “Mound of Mercury,” the medieval “Mount of Martyrs.”  Legend claims 3rd-century St. Denis was martyred here.  The feeble bishop, over one hundred years old, was beaten, grilled on an iron grate, hung on a cross, and decapitated.  He washed his head, then carried it down the hill to the village of Catalliacus to be buried, and where, two hundred years later, Genevieve erected his basilica.  In the centuries following, wave upon wave of persecution spilled the blood of many others on this hill overlooking Paris.  The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune Rising of 1871 devastated Paris, particularly Montmartre.

We left our taxi in the colorful and artsy Place du Tertre and walked half a block to the white steps leading to the columned porch.  Entering the massive space, I was struck as always by the apsidal dome which rises triumphantly over the high altar and the Blessed Sacrament in the golden-rayed monstrance.  The curved apse is covered in a brilliant blue-and-gold mosaic telling the story of Christ’s love and redemption.  The white-robed risen Christ opens his arms wide in welcome and blessing.  The Holy Spirit descends as a dove upon him; God the Father is above the dove – or coursing through the dove to His Son – forming the Holy Trinity.  The mosaic expresses the belief of catholic Christians, the mystery of the Host in the monstrance, the mystery of the Real Presence and of the Trinity, the three persons of God.

The church this day was sweetly quiet, although crowds milled through the side aisles and around the ambulatory.  After praying before the Blessed Sacrament raised over the high altar, we too stepped under along the side aisle, followng the ambulatory under the dome, gazing up through window archways to the apsidal mosaic.  From this position so close to the chancel and apse, the images are far larger, and now one sees the Holy Ghost descending as a white dove, now we see God the Father, now we see the face of Christ.  I thought how our own journeys are like that.  We catch glimpses of reality as eternity draws nearer.  We are blind but see in moments of glory.  I love the ambulatory walk behind the sanctuary of Sacre-Coeur and I paused often along the way before each Station of the Cross this holy season of Lent.  I paused, saw the image of Christ falling, Christ being crucified, and then looked up to the glorious glittering triumphant mosaic of our faith.  Through the suffering images of the Way of the Cross, Christ himself smiles upon us as God redeems us through his son.

Before leaving the church we visited the shop off the north aisle and found icons hand-made by the resident Benedictine nuns.  One was an image of Mary Magdalene seeing the risen Christ in the garden.  Since my current novel-in-progress is about Mary Magdalene, this was a particularly appreciated gift.  We also learned that the basilica was celebrating 125 years of Perpetual Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament raised high in that golden monstrance.  Retreats and pilgrimages were planned, and the nuns busy with housing and hosting folks in their residence.  This weekend the Archbishop of Spoleto-Norcia in Italy would be presiding over many events, including a Way of the Cross for young people and a Mass honoring the upcoming beatificaton of Jean-Paul II.

As I descended the white steps I looked over the city of Paris where a soft haze had settled. I turned and looked up to the towering white domes of Sacre-Coeur.  I gave thanks for this perpetual witness to the immense gifts of God.  I gave thanks for the perpetual prayers of peace.

http://www.sacre-coeur-montmartre.com/

It was so good to return to this luminous chapel on the Rue du Bac on the Left Bank near the Rue du Sevres where Catherine Laboure is venerated for her visions of the Virgin Mary in 1830.

We entered through a porte-cochere, followed a short drive and stepped into the large chapel.  It is a relatively modern, three-nave, galleried space with a domed chancel.  The walls glitter with pale blue-and-white mosaics, the apsidal arch is frescoed in pale blues, and the vaults float with light.  The Sacrament is reserved on the high altar, and to the right is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary as she appeared to Catherine Labouré in July of 1830.  Below the image lies Catherine’s incorrupt, undecayed, body.  In Offerings, my character, Rachelle DuPres, enters the chapel and reads the following leaflet:

On July 19, 1830, the feast day of Saint Vincent de Paul and six days before the streets of Paris were barricaded by the July Revolution, the Virgin Mary appeared to twenty-four-year-old Catherine Labouré.

Catherine, one of ten children born to a poor farming family in Burgundy, had joined Vincent de Paul’s Daughters of Charity. One night, three months after she arrived at the motherhouse on the Rue du Bac, an angel-child led her to the chapel. There, Mary appeared to her and predicted terrible times for France. She wore a white robe and held a globe representing the world.

She instructed Catherine to have medals made of a certain design with the words O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you. The Blessed Virgin promised graces to those who wore her medals and to those who prayed before her image in the chapel.

Catherine told her confessor and urged him to have the medals cast. The archbishop agreed, seeing no harm. She told no one else about the visions until her deathbed confession in 1876, forty years later. Decades after her death, the body of this “Saint of Silence” was found to be incorrupt, untouched by time.

We entered the chapel as Rachelle did in my novel.  It was just as I had recalled and described.  While there were numerous pilgrims kneeling in the pews and at the railing before the glass sarcophagus, the total silence added to the ethereal sense of the color and light.  Folks stepped quietly and carefully, to honor this “Saint of Silence.”

I have been here other times when a Mass was celebrated and the singing led by the nuns was joyous and lilting, a community of happiness.  We bring our sorrows and our worries, our sickness and our hurts.  We give thanks for prayers answered and blessings received.  We repent our wrongdoings, our not-doings, our restrained efforts at love, and in the silence, in the floating light, it is as though the Holy Spirit weaves among us.  It is as though angels, invisible doves, fly above, flapping the air with their wings.

I gazed through the glass wall of the coffin to the peaceful face, the body draped in her black-and-white habit of the Sisters of Charity.  This place, I thought, was indeed a place not only of charity in its giving to the poor, but of Saint Paul’s caritas, of love, probably the greatest gift of all: The love of God weaving among us.

We stepped outside the glimmering space to the shaded driveway and walked silently out to the busy Rue du Bac where shoppers rushed in and out of the Bon Marche Department Store, and taxis screeched around the corners.  I didn’t mind the noise and confusion.  I carried the silence and the light into the life of Paris.

http://www.chapellenotredamedelamedaillemiraculeuse.com