Wednesday, April 15, 2002

Sunday I got up early, read the paper and then went looking for the local church. I knew that 95% of France is Catholic so I knew what to look for but didn’t know exactly where to look. It is kind of hilly here so I couldn't just look for a tall steeple. It didn’t take long to find an old church just a few blocks from my hotel. I wasn’t sure it was still a church because it was obviously very old. I walked up to the entrance and the sign said that the church had been built in the 12th century, 1107 according to the sign. It was almost 900 years old! It looked it but I could see a few cars in the street near the church so I tried the door latch and to my surprise it was open and there were a couple of people kneeling in one of the pews so I knew it was still being used. Another sign told me that the morning mass was at 11:00 which I should have known because all Catholic churches have an 11:00 Sunday morning mass.

I was raised as a catholic and attended St. Patrick’s in Placerville until I graduated from high school and went away to college. I was baptized, confirmed, served as an altar boy, and one year was even the president of the local chapter of the Catholic Youth Organization.

I walked around town for a while and discovered a large farmer’s market on the riverbank next to the main drag. I walked through it for a while and then headed to church about 10:30. I wanted to get there early so I could just sit and meditate for a while before church started. When I walked in and was immediately approached by a small woman. At first I thought she was telling me to leave but she was actually just a greeter and was trying to give me the day’s bulletin.

These old churches are very dark so I had not noticed that she was smiling at me. Had I seen her smiling when I first came in I would have known I was welcome because French people don’t smile a whole lot, at least not to strangers.

I walked around the back and then decided to sit in one of the middle rows so I could see everything. After I sat down I was immediately sorry because I had forgotten to genuflect when I crossed the middle isle. This is done as a sign of acknowledgement of the presence of God at the altar, which is always at the end of the middle isle. There were only five other people in the church at the time so I doubted that anyone had noticed. Even if someone had been looking at me it was too dark to tell what I did or didn’t do. The churches are dark because there aren’t very many windows and the ones there are almost always are made of stained glass. Also the walls are made from stone and after hundreds of years this stone darkens.

Just before the mass started a whole bunch of young kids came into the church and ended up sitting in the section just in front of me. I felt better because most of them had not genuflected or done the sign of the cross or anything. They were pretty noisy but made me relax quite a bit because I knew that they would draw all of the attention. For some reason I had the nagging feeling that everyone would suspect that I was an intruder. This is a strange thing to feel because most churches are always happy to have someone new in a service. I guess it is part of my lifelong experiences of always being the new person.

I had been looking forward to this experience since I first began planning my journey. I imagined myself singing along with my fellow churchgoers. I knew enough French to read my hymnal and sing along. The only problem was that these guys only used the hymnal for one song and since it was of the call and response type I only got to sing half of it. Mostly I ended up humming nice harmony parts. I figured if I couldn’t sing the words then I could at least add some texture to the sound. There was a lot of Halleluiahs in some of the songs and I sang those good.

I really couldn’t understand any of the service because of the combination of them speaking too fast and the cavernous nature of the church itself. When I was regularly attending the Catholic church in the sixties, most of the liturgy, which was at least half of the service, was spoken in Latin. It sounded pretty much like that to me this Sunday.

I was also accustomed to each service being exactly one hour in length. At 11:55 it didn’t look like there was going to be time for communion. Communion is served at every Catholic mass. There were almost three hundred people in the church and I couldn’t figure out how in the world they were going to have communion and still get out of church on time. Well, at 12:05 five or six other people joined the priest at the front of the church. They were probably deacons or elders. Then the priest said something and everyone started filing out of the pews and going up to the front. It was then that I knew that everyone was taking communion, including me. What was quite different from what I was accustomed to was that all of the elders that were lined up at the front with the priest were handing out wafers along with the priest. When I was a Catholic only the priest was allowed to do that and he would place it directly on each person's tongue. Here they just handed it to you and then you put it your own mouth. They served communion in less that 5 minutes to almost everyone. Only a few did not take communion. You used to have to go to confession prior to taking communion because you couldn’t have any unconfessed sin when you did took communion. I knew that must have changed because there was no way that all these teenagers hadn’t done some things on Saturday night that they wouldn’t confess to any adult.

I promised I would write every couple of days but that has been harder to do than it was to promise. Not that I have anything else that I have to do but old habits are hard to break. Especially when you can do whatever you want to do. It is such a blessing to be able to get up leisurely in the morning or wake up at 7:00 whichever I feel like doing. Then I can choose whether to plan my day or not. I usually end up doing more than I intended when I got up but when the day is over I am satisfied with whatever I have done. What a change after spending the rest of my life always feeling like I have to get something done. I have taken up to 10 days on vacation in Mexico before but those vacations have only included a few days with no planned agenda. On the days when I don’t accomplish anything, and there have always been lots of those, I would finish the day feeling lazy and inadequate. That can drain you emotionally after awhile.