HOW TO FIND THE DIVINE IN PARIS: 7 SPIRITUAL SNAPSHOTS

My favourite destination is known as the “City of Lights,” and God is called the “Father of Lights.” Merely coincidence? Hmmm, I think not . . .

Paris, to me, is heaven on earth! Here are some steps to connecting with the metaphysical while in the metropolis:

• Seek out Nature: Paris encompasses more than four hundred parks—some dating back to the seventeenth century. A tourist can hardly escape the requisite gardens of the Champs-Elysées, Tuileries, or Versailles, but keep a lookout for pockets of green that sprout up behind school gates or on street corners or atop department stores. In Paris I’ve strolled through a Japanese garden, I’ve watched nuns eat a bag lunch on a bench behind the Notre Dame Cathedral, I’ve tasted strawberries and petted goats in the children’s amusement park in Bois de Boulogne. Even the starry backdrop behind the Eiffel Tower as I floated down the Seine at midnight reminded me that something exists beyond mankind. Nature has a way of extending human vision past pavement and progress to refocus the attention on a greater reality.

• Listen to the Music: Nothing transcends the bustle of humanity like strains of Debussy or Berlioz. Even if you (like I) don’t care to invest time and money in attending a formal concert when there’s so much else to do and see in the city, many inexpensive events are held in churches or other public buildings. Besides, Parisian buskers are some of the most talented musicians in the world: I’ve tapped my toes to accordion playing on the train, lounged on the steps of the D’Orsay Museum near a violinist making her strings sing, and enjoyed a full-blown orchestra in the underground hallways of the Métro. Live music is everywhere, and one of my favourite memories is of a jazz band in a smoky bar on Île Saint-Louis. Thomas Carlyle (a Scot who wrote a book on the French Revolution) once declared:

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

• Ogle the Architecture: Medieval cathedrals were designed to turn illiterate eyes heavenward, a religious instruction fully employed all over Paris. Don’t neglect to pop into churches for a peek as you pass by. I did just that with the thirteenth-century Sainte-Chapelle, the stained glass windows of which tell the grand sweep of biblical story from the Creation in Genesis through to the Apocalypse of Revelation. I fictionalized this visit in one scene of my first novel, when my character entered the lower level of the

Gothic space, devoid of notable ornamentation, that cast no prediction of the celestial splendor she’d find upon climbing the dank stairwell. But upstairs, multi-colored sunlight fractured the air above her head, the stained-glass kaleidoscope surrounding her like a halo of rubies and sapphires and emeralds. She rotated in a slow circle, head tipped upwards. Fifty-foot windows soared around her within a framework of marble arches extending into the vaulted ceiling like the ribs of an overturned ship, a thousand glass pictures she couldn’t at first interpret for their sheer profusion.                                                                                                        (The Third Grace, page 175)

• Glory in the Visual Arts:  Every arrondissement of Paris houses museums full of art. Online listings include close to two hundred official galleries throughout the city, making overload a real threat to a tourist’s peace of mind. So go easy when planning your itinerary and choose carefully—but let the art make its way into your soul. The Louvre, as arguably the world’s greatest museum, is a perfect starting place and, if you’ve got the stamina and can be satisfied with an overview, you can do a preplanned run-through in a few hours (although, of course, thoughtful enjoyment could stretch out for days). My first visit to the Louvre in 1989 showed me works from prehistoric pagan sculpture to Renaissance manuscript illumination, from the Baroque painters to the Impressionists, from pre-Enlightenment religious painting to the didactic style in the Age of Reason. The Louvre introduced me to the icon of my debut novel when I came across the marble statue grouping of The Three Graces, Greek goddesses that got me thinking about the essential, gritty earthiness of creation that contrasts the yearning we all have for the divine.

• Hear History: The limestone foundations of Paris were set into the Seine River over two thousand years ago, and the city has been the center of cultural history-making ever since, its ancient cobblestones feeling the soles of Celtic tribesmen and Roman soldiers, emperors, monks, and wandering minstrel jongleurs. Paris has known plague and war, royal intrigue and peasant revolt, religious massacres and philosophical movements. Marie Antoinette was beheaded in Paris, and there Voltaire theorized, Robespierre revolutionized, and Napoleon Bonaparte militarized. The city is saturated in history, an integral part of any trip. Whenever I visit as a tourist, I’m reminded that God, who from His own throne in the heavens oversees the coronation of all earthly powers, is the King of kings who governs time and eternity.

• Respect the Sleep of Death: Nothing brings spirituality into focus quite like a brush with mortality, and two top tourist attractions come to mind.
  • You might choose the Catacombs of Paris—an ossuary (or “bone yard”) situated in the underground tunnels of abandoned stone quarries beneath the city, housing the consecrated remains of six million people. Carved into the rock above the entrance to the subterranean museum is the phrase “Stop! This is the Empire of the Dead,” and throughout the rather macabre tour you can read other such reminders of life’s brevity and divine eternality as “Believe that every day is your last” and “God is not the author of death.”
  • I enjoyed a sunnier stroll through the Père Lachaise Cemetery, resting place of the likes of Balzac and Proust and Oscar Wilde, of composer Chopin and rocker Jim Morrison. Though a “city of the dead” with lanes and flowers and shady trees, this much cheerier graveyard is highly decorated in religious symbols: headstones and sepulchres are surmounted with statues of angels, crosses, praying hands, and Bibles; stone effigies of prone corpses and lively skeletons immortalized in marble hint at eventual resurrection; carvings of the dove of peace and the pelican of crucifixion spread their wings above the deceased as testimony to the Christian teaching of the afterlife.

• Pause to Pray: While in Paris, I often find myself responding in prayer to the thumbprint of the Creator visible on so many of the city’s surfaces—when I trace His face in the natural elements of park or garden, hear the celestial strains of music, view art and architecture, engage with history, and observe death’s reality within urbanity’s vigour and vibrancy.

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN: How do you experience spiritual reality when you travel? What stimulates you to consider the metaphysical when you visit foreign places? Share an adventure with me in the comments below!

TRANQUILITY

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I trod the 127 footsteps from the kitchen door down to the old elm tree by the creek—blissful backyard hideaway!—and sat with my husband like the old married couple we are on the lounge chairs he set side by side in amongst the marshy grasses. Wearied from his heavy workweek, he dozed off in the shade while puffy clouds built up above and around us in a ring circling the rim of the coulee we’re tucked into.

But I couldn’t sleep—the quiet was too noisy, too stimulating for me. Water babbled and bubbled over the beaver dam, birds swooped and sang chirping cheer, butterflies and bugs cavorted in the reeds, and the wind shushed at us through the willows growing thick along the banks. A wee frog sunned himself on a rock, and I thought I smelled a skunk but he left us alone.

And I pondered how sacramental the whole of nature is.

Now, we Evangelicals in the Reformed tradition don’t usually observe “sacrament” in the way some denominations do. That is, we don’t believe certain rites or mysteries effect conversion and regeneration; rather, we see the commemorative or memorial and not salvific value of, say, the ordinances of the Lord’s Supper and baptism. We believe that, upon personal trust in Jesus’ work on the cross, spiritual life springs up through an instantaneous creation by the Holy Spirit within the heart and soul, producing new attitudes and desires because of what God has done for us in Christ, leading to change in habits and actions.

However, the poetic sound of the smells-and-bells definition appeals to my fleshly, artistic nature. So, for the purposes of literary expression alone and speaking completely aside from theology, nature seems to me almost a sacrament: the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

After all, doesn’t the musical tinkling of water over cobblerock and the cooling kiss of a breeze on a summer’s day signify the Lord’s great love? Doesn’t the sharp pungency of wild mint crushed beneath my heel and the lush greenery raised to life so miraculously from a frozen snowdrift tell of His great mercy? Isn’t the hush and the plushness a reflection of His peace?

Okay, maybe I can’t go so far as to say that nature is sacramental; that’s bending theology too much. But with Isaiah and the Psalmist and Paul I declare:

The whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord and of His steadfast love; how manifold are His works and how majestic is His name! His eternal power and divine nature are clearly evident in His beautiful creation.    

 

          STONE-COLD BEAUTY

I visited my beloved Three Graces in Paris one month ago today—got to the Louvre early enough to avoid lines and was outta there before noon. I targeted the Richelieu wing and followed the map through the palace’s grand hallways and airy courtyards to find my stone-cold beauties awaiting me in their salon among other French sculptures. But I had eyes only for them. And as I admired them, I was again in the head of my novel’s main character—born Mary Grace Klassen but now going by her self-adopted name of “Aglaia.”

This excerpt shows Mary Grace/Aglaia as she first met the Greek goddesses:

The life-sized Graces stood on a marble base so that Aglaia had to look up into them like a fourth party, a child approaching a trio of grown-ups who were companions of each other in an intimate alliance. They didn’t condemn or condone her intrusion; she was to them a specter, unseen and unheeded while their communion continued. The personification of grace, they were poised as if asking, “May I throw my spell around you, beautify you as I clothed the very gods?” Aglaia could sense their infinite waiting, triplets frozen in marble for all time, three persons chiseled from one substance. They were a tri-unity of personhood.

Aglaia wanted to lose herself in their lifelikeness, to wish them into reality. The pearly grey skin, bellies rounded and buttocks dimpled, dented under their mutual caresses. Did she see the throb of a vein in a neck, or a breast rise and fall? She almost smelled the heat of flesh. Could their noses smell, their tongues taste? She was nearly persuaded, but their eyes gave them away—sightless, flat, no markings of iris or pupil. Now that she studied them in the flesh, so to speak, she couldn’t differentiate them except by their props and their postures. The three faces could be one; there was little to set each goddess apart, and it perturbed her.

The Grace on the left peered downwards as if in expectation that a plant would sprout at any moment from the soil. She held a swag of flowers draped across her thigh and behind her derrière to wrap around one sister and up in an encompassing bond over the shoulder of the other, who stared out at eye level across the distance, the back of her hand pressed against the breast of the center figure, wrist softly bent.

But the middle Grace was the one that claimed Aglaia’s attention. The middle Grace stepped lightly on a jewelry box, like a victor claiming possession or a child at the beach sinking her toe in the sand. She held her chin high, gaze cast heavenward seeking the radiance of the sun or of her father, Zeus.

Aglaia knew her name—knew all their names, read many times since she first saw that postcard, murmured to herself on lonely nights. Thalia, on the left, was the goddess of the garden and all that flourished in nature’s abundance; she was given domain over the harvest and brought hearty nourishment to her sisters and all the gods. Euphrosyne, on the right, was the pleasure-giver, goddess of mirth and dance, the life of the party. But the middle Grace, Aglaia, was known as the most beautiful, the brightly shining one, the keeper of treasures.

Aglaia, her self-approved namesake and her idol.

Golden light flowed through the courtyard windows, bathing the Three Graces, coating their surface without breaking the barrier of their solidity or solidarity. Pradier had carved life onto them, told a story out of the marble and it was an enchanting story but incomplete, for he couldn’t breathe life into them. They were an unfinished covenant, a memorial. They were a tombstone like Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt languishing for the cities of destruction, blinded by the gods of their age as, perhaps, Mary Grace had been blinded.

For the first time since she was a teen, Aglaia began to second-guess her decision to change her name, her identity. She found herself inexplicably irritated by the marble statues, as lifeless as Pygmalion’s carving before its vivification, as Eve before hers. What had Aglaia, after all, expected from them throughout these years? Seeing the Three Graces in person, Aglaia felt the wind go out of herself.      (THE THIRD GRACE, pages 187-189)

         FOIE GRAS

I’m currently in the grips of a madly lustful affair with foie gras. This will come as no surprise to  readers of my recent Facebook postings from France, in which I detailed several of my trysts with various foods. I flirted with vin, I dallied with saucisson, I fairly threw myself at crème fraîche and chocolat. But I left the country with an empty wallet (surely the sign of one besotted) and six glass jars full of my latest infatuation, which I will mete out to myself and a select few over the next year.

It’s hard for me to envision that time in my life not so long ago when I hadn’t yet tasted this splendid organ meat that occupies much of my gastronomical dream life. My friend and hostess last week in the South of France—Christelle—told me how, as a girl at Christmastime, she and her mother would go to the market and choose a squawking, fat goose for the butcher to kill and eviscerate in front of them while they watched the emergence of a magnificent liver quivering in its bloated glory, which they took home to sear in a blistering pan as the appetizer to their family meal. Of course, the product I brought home with me is not (thanks to Canada Customs) the raw version but a soft, cooked meat swimming in yellow fat. (I know, it doesn’t sound too pretty, but what magnificent flavour!) Christelle has taught me to never mistakenly call this princely food “pâté,” and neither is it “terrine,“ both of which are much more processed and—well—crude, so to speak (if also delicious in a more rustic way). The foie gras pictured in the jars here is the entire liver, seasoned sparingly, that I’ll spread cold on crusty white bread or toast points—mostly duck with one jar of goose I’ll save for a special occasion to consume with a bottle of real champagne. But I won’t start for a couple of months yet—not until the taste of France, like a paramour’s kiss, has left my mouth.

The chef-prepped delight served me on my second-to-last night in France was created by Montpellier propriétaire extraordinaire Wilfredo who, local legend has it, hates to cook for more than a few people at a time. (Check out his establishment—le Passionné). I don’t have a photo of that splendid dish. I doubt a photo could encapsulate my experience, anyway—the presentation of three half-inch-thick, gold-and-pink slices on a bed of softened lychee fruits in Port reduction, the slight resistance as I cut through the sliver-thin crust, the succulence as I crush the delicacy between tongue and palate with a crystal or two of sea salt spiking through the round, soft fullness of the meat.

Well, you can tell I am hopelessly in love. Perhaps the ardour will pass, but I cherish it for the moment, adoring the power foie gras exerts upon my corporeal senses. It’s almost sacramental—an outward and visible sign of an inward and (in this case) scrumptious grace. In my estimation, foie gras is certainly a gift from above.

          AU NATUREL

Okay, I’ll admit I’ve had yearnings to be a hippie since the summer of ’69, when hitchhikers between Toronto and Vancouver wandered into Winnipeg’s Memorial Park with their groovy love beads. My tender age and general morality protected me from their bad habits if not their fashion tastes. I took to wearing flowers in my hair and making muslin sundresses.

So it’s predictable (considering my love for all things lemon) that I succumbed when I found an online recipe for homemade lemon deodorant. It follows:

Mix ¼ cup arrowroot or cornstarch with ¼ cup baking soda. Mash in 6 tablespoons coconut oil. Add drops of lemon essential oil.

I packed the product into tiny plastic jars and, because the stuff smells so yummy, I even licked my fingers. I don’t advise that. In fact, I don’t advise you make this goop at all; it’s unpleasantly grainy to the touch, it bleeds oil from the container, and I’m not even sure it works. I’m reverting to my (slightly less hip) mineral deodorant stone.

To smell lemony, I’ll continue to depend on perfume. I have several citrusy scents to choose from: two by Jo Malone and one (my favourite) purchased in southern Italy last year—Via Camerelle by Carthusia—extracted and blended and bottled on the Isle of Capri just off the coast. One whiff of this delightful fragrance takes me back to the lemon groves of Sorrento.

I’m almost out of Via Camerelle. I’ve stalked websites and phoned department stores from Holt Refrew to Saks, but no one in North America seems to carry it. However, since I’m going to Paris in two weeks from today, I’ve decided to buy it there. Buying Italian perfume in a Parisian boutique to wear at home with Canadian mukluks is my idea of quintessential travel! And, besides, the French will probably applaud my decision to not use homemade deodorant.

A vivid and lasting memory from my wanna-be hippie days (besides I Love Lemon cologne bought on Portage Avenue at Woolworth’s five-and-dime counter and worn by many fellow Winni-boppers) comes from the “Jesus Movement” that swept cities and instigated Christian coffeehouses throughout Canada and the States at the tail end of the era. In “House of Peter,” I rubbed shoulders with longhairs who loved the Beatles and went to Woodstock and who’d been part of Haight-Ashbury ‘s summer of love—in fact, who represented the whole free-love epoch—and were now instead singing songs to the One who is Love Himself. On the one hand, they didn’t all smell as good as I did but, on the other, they sure influenced my understanding of the fragrance of true love:

And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Eph. 5:2).

          RETREAT

There is nothing about the word “retreat” matching what I did this past weekend!

I mean, sure, I joined the ladies from Temple Baptist Church out in the wilderness (so to speak) of southern Alberta: fifteen of us (and four nursing infants) settled into a great lodge built in the western tradition of sturdy peeled-log posts and beams, with giant stone fireplaces and comfy leather furniture; we ate hearty oatmeal and succulent chicken and homemade cinnamon buns that we didn’t prepare ourselves; we walked around a small lake and gloried in the sunny skies and didn’t hear any traffic; we napped in the afternoon and stayed up till 3:00 AM (well, some of us); we played games that had us all howling with laughter. So I suppose there was a sense of “retreating” involved in all that, but I would call it more of an “advance.” I sure advanced in my friendships this weekend.

I was so honoured to be the speaker at this event–only the second time I’ve presented a series of talks at a multi-day function (although, of course, I’ve been speaking with Stonecroft Ministries for about a decade). The organizers asked me to prepare a four-part series on the theme of friendship (the bones of which you can read here) that I titled “A Cord of Three Strands: The Bond of Friendship.” The biblical research it necessitated was very enriching for me, and I came up with the following chiastic outline:

1a. Friendship in Eternity Past

                        1b. Friendship in the Garden

                                                1c. Alienation from God and Others

                                                                        X. God’s Overtures and the Cross

                                                2c. Reconciliation with God and Others

                        2b. Friendship in Church and World: Message and Ministry

2a. Friendship in Eternity Future

I talked those women’s ears right off–and my throat feels it today! What a delightful time and opportunity for me to share what I studied–which is always a sure-fire way for me to learn it better myself.

In the fall, I will again speak at a women’s retreat, this time in Saskatchewan. I think I’m getting the hang of this.

(Photos by Jasmine Stoesz)

          RAINFOREST

I’m a prairie girl besotted by BC’s old-growth forests. My husband and I just returned from a few days on Vancouver Island, where we walked the rainforest trail near Ucluelet, following along a wooden slatted path raised above the ground and wondering at the mystical beauty. My dreams are now full of cedars and hemlocks and firs, bark wrinkled with the deep furrows of many centuries, branches sleeved in velvet moss and draped with tangled vines, trunks encircled with climbing, sun-seeking creepers. Stepping in and out of the dappled shadows amongst the towering giants humbled me. The forest floor was crisscrossed with fallen trunks, overgrown with ferns and mistletoe, veiled in green–everything a moist haze of living green so luminous it shone as though giving off light itself. Sounds were muffled and subtle–the plink of a raindrop on a waxy leaf, the far-off cough of a raven, wind whispering mischievously in the treetops far above. And oh! that earthy, mulchy scent pervading everything–a mixture of cedar chest and flower garden.  It was magical. I need to return soon.

          TOURISM OR TRAVEL?  

It’s settled: I’m off to France in June for three weeks of Gallic culture! I’ve booked the cutest hotel in Paris for four nights; I’ll be meeting a couple of Parisian girlfriends, but I’m also planning to wander for hours by myself—to take in a couple of museums and the wonderful Les Puces flea market, to buy my new favourite perfume at Galeries Lafayette, and to saunter down cobblestone alleys and the walkways along the Seine River. Maybe I’ll remember some of my French phrases for eavesdropping as I sip vin blanc at a sidewalk café or when ordering bistro feasts. Then I’m off to the South for a visit with my third French girlfriend and her family—including a tour of restaurants, a night in an ancient mas (Provençal farmhouse/mansion), and all the home-grown strawberries I can eat. Superbe!

My friend Dallas shared with me a rivetting article, “Reclaiming Travel,” which appeared last summer in a column in The New York Times. The basic thesis is that today’s tourism (modelled by my upcoming vacation with its focus on rest and restaurants, entertainment, and personal enrichment) is but a faint shadow of real travel (more like a pilgrimage or quest in its cross-cultural, transformational search for meaning). Tourism is largely what we do nowadays; travel is something more rare that changes who we are. The human journey first started, the writers of the piece claim, at our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, when we were condemned to wander—our wandering becoming a wondering about exile and about our true home, with hearts restless for something lost.

Of course, journey is a frequent theme in classic literature; think of Homer’s Odyssey (telling of the Greek hero’s mythic return home after battle) and Dante’s Divine Comedy (a spiritual travel tale tracing the path from the “dark wood” through hell and purgatory to heaven). The meme continues through to stories written today, from Gulliver’s Travels, Innocents Abroad, and Around the World in Eighty Days to Lord of the Rings, A Year in Provence, and Eat, Pray, Love. I could go on, but you get my point.

The motif of travel is omnipresent in the late-Victorian writings of G.K. Chesterton. In Everlasting Man he wrote:

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.

Then, encapsulating the nature of journey, in What’s Wrong with the World Chesterton wrote a couple of lines that I used as the first epigram in my own novel:

Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for.

(If you’re interested in the biblical ground for mankind’s wandering and wondering about the road, homecoming, and rest, you might like to read three short literary/biblical studies I posted in April, June, and July of 2012, here.)

My meandering thoughts today have set me on a course of inner contemplation regarding why I love to visit exotic places and what adventure really means to me. My forebears travelled, in the true sense of the word, to make a home in a foreign land—largely for religious freedom. So my history connects travel with spiritual life. Yet here I am, a few generations later, traversing the globe for personal, emotional, and gastronomical satisfaction. Much as I’d love to pretend I might just find an epiphany on French soil, I concede that my trip is more tourism than true travel. I don’t expect great character growth (though I might be surprised); I just hope I properly pronounce merci!

          BREAKFAST

I don’t like to eat too early in the morning. Today it was ten before I cut up my usual oranges topped with plain yogurt and salted sunflower seeds, added a cappuccino made from freshly ground decaf beans, and for good measure juiced a couple of grapefruit. I’m enjoying this repast as I write—and as I think about the significance of breaking my fast.

I’m never hungry in the morning, though I haven’t eaten for over twelve hours. It takes those first few bites to get the saliva running, I suppose. At first, my body resists; but if I wait until my stomach growls, I sometimes don’t eat till afternoon.

This lethargy is mirrored in my inner life as well. Learning something new takes effort and isn’t appealing at first—until I’ve turned the first few pages or clicked onto an engaging site. But once I’ve started, the intellectual juices get flowing and I feast on ideas. It’s the same with my soul; it needs nutrition as well, and too often the fast stretches long enough that I lose my appetite for things of the Spirit. I need to take the first bite to remember that the words of God are sweeter than honey and the honeycomb (Ps. 19:10).

          ISTANBUL

Esma is on a crusade for the perfect lamb meatball recipe to take home to her uncle’s bistro in Manhattan and has purchased sacksful of aromatic spices at the market—cloves and paprika, powdered cumin and beads of coriander, crescent-shaped fennel seeds and purple-black pepper with a brass grinder thrown in . . .

I haven’t written a short story for ages, and just sent one off for critique by: (1) a Christian teacher intimately familiar with Islam; (2) my sister, a poet; (3) an author of 75 books and editor of hundreds; and (4) my daughter, a trendy young reader the age of my character.

Now, back to drafting my novel after a long hiatus!