There are a lot of things I’m not sure of when it comes to religion, but here is one of them: really, what do you do with the extra holy water? It’s that thing when you dip your fingertip in to cross yourself and suddenly it’s dripping because you had one of those little nervy jerks and you extend it too far, and it seems blasphemous to wipe off the excess so you’re stuck with trying to figure out how best to handle water that is supposed to make you sacred for just a brief moment.
I had this problem last weekend in a soaring stone church in Metz, a palm branch and the program clutched in one hand and the other glittering with consecration. Had it been sunny I would have been sitting in a puddle of stained color from the windows that seemed to serve as walls, but given that it’s France and it’s still winter despite what the vernal equinox says, I sat instead on cool hardwood between my adopted French family (what a wonderful family — really, what luck) and a perfect stereotype of the Elderly French Woman, scarf and smoker’s voice included.
The night before, the blue-eyed prodigal brother and I had stood in disbelief as a car en vitesse crushed itself against the stone top of the stairs we had just descended not 30 seconds before. Like a bad action movie, but with a more a more unbelievable plotline, the iron lamppost fell in slow motion off the top of the stairs with an almighty crash—stones dislodged from this ancient staircase came rolling to our feet—smoke rose from the front bumper, now about as intact as a boxer’s front teeth. Holy shit, I breathed. Did that just happen? What just happened? Two at the time, I ran up the steps two at a time trying not to avoid the jumble of stone to see what was in the car (Emilie stop) and it was the flooded moment of relief that I remembered in that church the next day, the moment that I reached the top and saw that there was no one in the car, that no one was hurt, that unbelievably not just I and Charles had gotten lucky but that somehow (onlookers told me) the driver had bailed before the car hit, and walked away without a scratch. I tried not to take it too seriously, but you bet I appreciated it in Mass the next day.
(end of story. religous musings follow)
The holy water the next morning fell from my forehead to the tip of my nose, and I decided the best way to go was to seep it up with the palm branch. There’s luck and then there’s grace; or maybe it’s just good karma. I stumbled along with the French translations of prayers I know by heart, and in the space that your mind goes when you don’t concentrate on language I started thinking about the other places that I’ve mangled the words but felt the same cadence. It’s nice that the structure of a Catholic mass spans languages. In a church carved into the Spanish mountains three years ago, we celebrated Christmas alongside r-rolling villagers, and a pint-sized altar server made a point to solemnly share the peace with each member of my obviously foreign family. Six years ago, my father and I stood at the back of a tiny Italian church and listened to nuns sing Vespers, something vaguely unearthly. Three days ago, I noticed that the French address Jesus with the informal tu, reserved for friends and equals. You are not too grand; we do not know of you, we know you.
I go to church sometimes because it makes me feel content in the same way that hugging my mother after a long time makes me feel content, or after one of those heart-to-hearts with your best friend in the grass in the summer makes you feel content, because for me, connecting with my faith is going back to someone who knows me and has for a while. But I also believe that your faith is a personal choice and not one that you should force on others, and that all religions bring to their believers the same peace. I’ve felt the same awe in the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul that I did in the magnificent churches of Granada that I do in the National Cathedral in DC. The best Palm Sunday I’ve ever spent was on the back of a recalcitrant donkey in the sandy earthlessness of the hills of Luxor in Egypt, where I felt closer to the reality of that story than in a clean little church. Once I accidentally walked the Stations of the Cross on the grounds of a Franciscan monastery in Arizona, accompanied by a grumpy peacock. I’ve crossed myself in Spain and in Ireland and in Croatia, but I’ve also (blasphemously?) blessed myself with water from a mirrored mountain lake in North Carolina, because it didn’t seem so awful if I did.
Why this twisty treatise on religion and travel? Letting my thoughts spin out, I suppose. In my work here, the social implications of religion are evident everywhere. Sitting among fabric pieces and whirring sewing machines in the ateliers de couture where we go to talk about HIV/AIDS, we talk to men about sex and prevention and religion, and how to live with religion and compassion. At home in the US, gay marriage is on the table with two important Supreme Court cases, and for me it’s a very firm belief that equality and love are both things that religion should support. And tomorrow I’m heading to Rome to see my family for the first time since I left, and to celebrate Easter in Rome with the new pope who we hope will effect some change in the Church—a little more progressiveness, a little more activism, a little more love.
Ibrahim in the atelier last Friday, who celebrates his 20th year of marriage next month, said it well. « La religion est pour le bien-être. Tous les religions, elles sont pour le bien-être—ça c’est leur rôle. » Whether it was good luck or good timing or just good karma from giving up my seat on the Métro to old ladies all the time, I’m pretty pleased that Charles and I avoided a ridiculously dramatic death, and I’d like to use this extra lease on life to take the bien-être from my religion to work for the bien-être of all people, regardless of their religion or lack thereof.
I’ll let y’all know how Pope Francis is settling in.
Emily Wolfteich 