Europe From Above

I have a lot of pictures from Europe. Like, a lot. And I'm not quite sure what to do with them all, but I figured I'd share some of the vistas I've seen because I became a semi-professional cathedral climber over the summer. Enjoy! 

Prague

Berlin

Vienna

Venice. Actually, one of the less impressive pictures I took there.

Florence. Sigh. Love!

Rome

Pompeii

Madrid

Seville

Marseilles

Lyon

Paris

Glasgow

Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Editor's Note: This is lengthy and internet is oddly harder to obtain when you're busy, even if you're in America. Also, I couldn't get all the pictures to load. A thousand apologies. 

On my last night in Edinburgh, I went to go see a comedian with Christine, Kerry, and a couple of people from the hostel. Being of Scottish heritage but born in Canada and currently residing in England, he had a, shall we say, unique perspective on the different societies that he had viewed. He was hilarious and I laughed so hard that I cried throughout much of the show. Just one of the positives of visiting Edinburgh during the Fringe Fest- the place was full of comedy, plays and other performing arts. The comedian remarked that arriving in Edinburgh is much more impressive when one arrived by train in Waverly Station. You get off the train and there are bagpipes and people dressed up for performances and tourists galore and then there's this castle- you're generally a little overwhelmed when you get off the train in Edinburgh.

I loved it there, despite the rain and cold that I will almost incessantly complain about when I talk about the city, having become very homesick for heat that hits you like a wall of boiling air and humidity, and near drought conditions. Neil Gaiman stuck it into my head that Oscar Wilde once said that if this is how the Scots treat their summers, they don't deserve one. I don't know that the Scots must have done to offend summer so, but the entire time I was there it felt more like January of perhaps a cold snap in March than early August.

Still, the hostel I was at was small and full of interesting, friends people. On my second night a group of four came in from London and I spent many of my nights listening to their conversations and easy friendship. As wonderful as it was to find new people to be friends with, that wonderfulness was exceeded by having more familiar faces to enjoy the city with. Christine returned from her visit with her family in Ireland and brought Kerry, a friend of hers and an acquaintance of mine, with her from the independent island off the British coast. Her friend Jesse also came to visit, taking the bus up from London where he had been studying this summer.

Together we took a walking tour of Edinburgh that I highly recommend if you have the means. We listened to the history of Scotland as told through the lens of its capital, walking up and down the Royal Mile, stopping by  the outside of the cathedral, John Knox's grave, the Grassmarket, Greyfriars Kirkyard, home to Greyfriars Bobby, walking past Fringe venues and ending up in the Princes Street Gardens. Did you know that James Clerk Maxwell was a Scotsman? Good, because if you did it would probably be because you learned his equations in E&M and I would fear for your state after enduring the merciless tyranny of physics. But there are plenty of other notable Scotsman besides William Wallace- Robert Burns, Ewan McGregor, Sean Connery, David Hume, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. JK Rowling has a small castle up there. I have also visited the Elephant Room, the café where she wrote the first three books of Harry Potter. Nerd moment of the trip completed.

I went back to the cathedral on my own for the Sunday morning service, taking communion in a huge circle by passing the loaf of bread and the cup of wine, each eating and drinking on their own before being blessed as a group by the priest. The choir sang an anthem, little bags were passed around for the offering, the priest preached a sermon on a letter of Paul and a gospel lesson about Jesus walking on water and Simon Peter sinking. Later, as I walked around, I noticed the lion and the unicorn protecting a shield as I'm used to seeing in Scotland and thistles in the decorations, proclaiming the national symbol of Scotland. 

The cathedral was interesting and historical. It was laid out in a Greek cross, the first church I had visited like that and the altar stood at the intersection of the arms of the cross with the congregation on either side coming together for communion. It's a different kind of space and coming forward for communion made me think about the service back in St. Mary's in Berlin, passing the peace to people whose language I didn't speak. Here, I walked to the heart of the church and circled around the altar and smiled and shook hands with kind Scots and thought about how far I'd been.

The last thing I did in Edinburgh was climb Arthur's Seat. It's a huge hill on the edge of town, a touch of the highlands for which my heart ached. We had climbed it earlier, Christine, Kerry, Jesse and I, and we had stopped by the small ruin of a chapel near the beginning of the climb. 

There's not much left of this chapel, just and entry way, two windows, an arch support and a couple of corners, but the space lends itself to an absolutely mystical quality. You can rebuilt the chapel in your mind and imagine the monks who must have come here, lighting torches or candles for late night vigils. The crag around you minds you of a faerie world where sprites and nymphs could come and infest the stone of a place meant for Someone else, packing the place with a meaning all to different from the one you're accustomed to assume. And if you let your thoughts run wild you can imagine a day when we've all but left these places, these cities and these cathedrals, when the grass will grow again in the wind-deposited dirt and the walls of all of these grand houses of God that I've seen time and again in my months abroad will be reduced to a doorway, two windows and a corner, blackbirds racing each other around the ruins.

I didn't revisit the chapel on my solitary hike up and we didn't stay long as a crew the first climb up. We were beat up the hill by a trio of middle aged men determined to scale the mountain quicker than the college kids in their prime. We stopped often to take pictures and be distracted by a man walking his cat along the heath at the bottom of the valley. We paused just before the final trek up to the rocky peak, collapsing on the oddly-well maintained grass to guess at the shapes hidden in the clouds, watching as the high wind demolished them, leaving us with new patterns. I paused to look out again at the sea the sneaks into Edinburgh when I climbed by myself, but only for the briefest of seconds before picking out another path among the rocks.

The climb up to the top of the seat is up uncovered rock, different from the steep slope of grass that came before. As a group we laughed, first following the chains and posts and then guessing at the easiest climb before stumbling up to the open vista of the crown of the hill. I meandered around when I returned by myself, not pausing at the top but instead selecting a hidden outcropping to sit and think and read. Leaves of Grass lay abandoned in the pocket of my pack. I broke out a collection of stories by Neil Gaiman and immersed myself in a world of wonder, feeling the wind blow my hair around for the last time. When we four had climbed the seat, we had found our way around to the tops of the rocks, laughing and taking pictures and waiting for a group of Spanish-speaking tourists to give up their place on the highest before giving up and climbing up there anyway, crowding around the back of the dulled peak of peaks.

I left the last of my locks on a iron hook up on Arthur's Seat, the hefty one I had bought for five euro in Paris. I hadn't needed it in the hostel and wouldn't need it for our one night in Dublin before flying from there to Chicago to Charlotte. I can remember the jokes the group told as we picked our way down the rocks and flew down the hill before, but as I walked back by myself I turned a corner I hadn't seen before and walked down a stair step of rocks and trickling water. I walked through grass and by thistles, purple and green and perfect as I tugged my jacket closer against the wind.

On our way out of the city the next morning we sat on the top of the double-decker bus to the Edinburgh airport and Kerry cut off the conversation for a few moments so she could say her goodbyes to Edinburgh. I had been woken up that morning by a goodbye- Brooke, the Australian nurse from my room, had left the hostel group early to get on a plane for a night in London, despite the riots, before leaving out on a tour of the continent. We had said multiple goodbyes to the people in the hostel before walking in the rain to the bus station. Through all of this, I had never thought of saying goodbye to the city. Faced with the thought of leaving, I found my mind distracting itself from the idea. I don't do goodbyes. I was glad when Kerry finished hers and Christine and I discussed plans for surprising Pam when we returned to the States for her birthday.

I sat in an aisle seat on the plane. Given a window, I'll stare out at the ground, memorizing the place I've been from the air before it disappears in the clouds. With that moment taken away, I think I'll keep long montage of pictures taken from the upper floors of castles and cathedrals and hills looking over the cities I've seen in my mind as my memorization of Europe. I'll begin in Prague and I'll end at Arthur's Seat and I'll think of all the things I've left. And all the things I've gained.

Glasgow Churches

Editor's note: I left my camera card my computer because I was catching up on Paris posts and so I didn't take any pictures. Sorry. 
Editor's secondary note: I can't claim to have come up with some of my comments on the use of spaces in church architecture that come later in the post. I'd love to talk it over with you, citing heavily from Richard Kieckhefer's Theology in Stone.
Editor's final note: This is a long post. I'm sorry again. 

So the last time I came to Scotland I came with my youth choir. It's quite different when you're traveling in a large group- the potential for getting the wrong train or bus isn't as great, as you've got a coach to travel in, your meals are much more determined and you have a ready-made group of friends. It's very different from showing up at the train station and hoping your hostel is close enough to walk and sociable enough to make friends.

The wonderful thing about having been in a place already, though, is the potential of friends to meet you. My choir director from back home is friends with a Scottish Methodist pastor who has a circuit of four churches just outside of Glasgow and after a couple of emails, Liz and her husband met me outside my hostel on Sunday morning for a day of exploring the Methodist churches around Glasgow.

Now, I grew up in the Bible Belt of the United States. We had FCA in high school and most people had a youth group of some kind that they went to on Sundays or Wednesdays or the occasional Thursdays. I pretty much lived at my church in high school and it was a big change in college when I only had Sunday School, a small group and bell choir to go to. I'm used to a regular congregation of 200 or more filling the room I'm in on a Sunday morning and there's nothing unusual to me about not knowing every member of the congregation. In short, I'm used to big spaces and lots of people on a Sunday morning.

The church in Scotland isn't particularly like that. Across Europe I've been to several services in large cathedrals with full crowds, but on the whole, the services have been made of smaller congregations. Christianity is on the decline in the Western world and there's not really any getting around that. With that in mind, getting up to read the two lessons on a Sunday morning in front of less than twenty members of the congregation wasn't surprising, especially after having been warned. We were in a small sanctuary upstairs in the church, looking for all the world like a small village church placed on top of a meeting hall.

This is the thing that I've been missing most when visiting big churches- none of them seem to have fellowship halls or a church office in another building or rehearsal spaces around back or anything like that. My church campus back home has four or five buildings depending on how you count- there's the sanctuary and the attached children's building, the church office and education building, the youth building and the Family Life Center (fellowship hall). It's the meetings that occur, either on Sunday mornings for Sunday school or during the week for any number of small groups, committees, organizations or rehearsals that form the life of the church. The ceremony on Sunday is the knot that ties all the strings of our different focuses together.

So I climbed a set of stairs following behind the greeter at the church door and walked into the sanctuary, noting the layout of the church- three sections of fixed pews plus a balcony all facing the altar on a raised platform in the center front of the church, accompanied by a pulpit just off on stage left, a piano on stage right and a nice set of stairs up to the organ that dominated the wall behind the altar. In a cathedral, you're likely to see a huge altar piece behind the main altar after walking through the choir. It was a comfort to see an organ back there, almost marking the Wesley brothers' musical emphasis.

Liz had told the people we greeted just outside the sanctuary that I was here visiting and studying worship spaces and how they're used in liturgy. This has indeed been a focus of mine but not something I've talked about very much at all here. Let me explain.

The majority of the places I've seen have been longitudinal ceremonial churches- they're laid out either in a hall or in a cross and the focus of the church is the altar. The liturgical focus is communion- sermons have grown important over the years, but we're as expected or central as we see them today until the Middle Ages leading into the Renaissance. Mass is pretty much the same everywhere beginning with a procession Bible bearers, acolytes, crucifers and priests who all need to bring the holy accoutrements of a service into the prepared space. The congregation sits and watches and comes forward for communion at the end. All of the rest of the side altars, chapels and decorations, unless they're used in the procession, are there for devotional use. There hasn't been much need to talk over this use of the space- it's the same, with variations over time, that's been in place since Christians began using basilicas in Constantine;s time.

This church was arranged the same way, though without the side altars. Another difference is that the action of the service happened at the pulpit as opposed to the altar- Liz led prayers and started off hymns and preached from the pulpit. We didn't even have communion. Much of the time, a protestant service is going to be focused on the pulpit and the sermon. Even though we occupy ceremonial churches, we've adapted them to put a focus on the things we feel are important. Some honor tradition more than others but most reflect the changes that came about a couple hundred years ago.

But that's just the inside layout of the church. Most longitudinal churches are going to be on the ground floor of a building, because the space is so well suited for processions into the building. A few ceremonial steps up to the entrance to the sanctuary aren't that big of a deal, but the winding stair in this church sets the sanctuary apart from the more easily accessible fellowship hall. The sanctuary is an upper room now, and you go there purposefully, no chance of wandering in off the street and finding it. It's a different emphasis, an interesting combination of ceremony and fellowship that also presents challenges in accessibility. It makes you want to read into the history of the church and see the thought behind the design even as you sit through a Sunday in the life of the living church.

I loved reading the lessons and singing hymns and listening again to a service in my language with a sermon I could understand and think through. We're such people of words, we protestants. It's the lyrics that make our songs holy, not the tunes in particular. Liz had picked the hymn words but let the organist pick the tunes. After the service, the organist came over to chat and offered me an old red hymnal. Not to brag, but I've been told by multiple other people that Methodists have the best hymnal and, as a church choir mouse, I've loved my fair share of hymnals over time. I was surprised at the gift and I kept asking, "To have? I can keep it?" and Liz said, "It's funny the things she gets excited about," with a laugh.

A favorite pastime of mine is exploring churches. Given the connections to facilitate the opportunity, I would love to spend days wandering in and out of the maze of back halls I'm sure cathedrals have. Maybe I'll write a book and then I can go like Victor Hugo and familiarize myself with the twists and turns of the stairs of Notre Dame. Given the opportunity here, just outside of Glasgow, we found our way into the old sacristy down a back stair that led from the sanctuary to a hallway that led eventually to the fellowship hall. A small room at the back of the sanctuary served as the sacristy now and this room lay forgotten. On wall, though, was a framed letter from John Wesley himself. See, I'm a nerd. This means I'm given free reign to be utterly excited about subjects that might confuse other people. A letter from the founder of my favorite branch of Christianity? I love history.

We left Port Glasgow and headed over to Paisley, home of the fabric pattern. The streets are all named after things in the textiles industry- there's a Gauze Street and a Silk Street, etc. You figure I'd feel at home, growing up across the street from a clothing factory. There's an abbey in Paisley and the largest Baptist church in Europe, I believe. It's interesting to think about the heydey of the town and the kinds of churches built then- how exactly do the stars align to set prosperous times in Paisley with a rise in the Baptist interpretation of the faith?

But we came to Paisley to look at the Methodist hall that houses a congregation of 80, a fair sized congregation. The place looks like a theater from the street, a large building on a street corner without a peaked roof or steeple to mark it from the shops around it. The gated front door even reminded me a bit of a box office, though no ticket windows peered out from the walls. The morning's service, held in the fellowship hall on the first floor, had ended but a few people had come in to see the hall. We walked upstairs and I felt in my element again- after two months, give or take a week, of walking into churches with the express purpose of looking around, I was quite used to touring sacred spaces.

The Methodist Hall in Paisley is quite different from the other churches I've primarily studied, but not so different from the churches I've found myself worshiping in over the years. Instead of following in the traditions of Roman basilicas shaped into crosses that had formed church architecture for the longest time, designed for ceremonies and sacraments, the Methodist Hall is an auditorium, built for the speaking and hearing of sermons. The downstairs is full of theater seats facing a raised stage comprising of two side stages and a central platform jutting out just a bit with indentations. The pulpit used to stand there, when the hall was in use, again just in front of the organ console and pipes that dominated the wall behind it. A communion table could be brought out as well and probably placed on the lower level, underneath the pulpit. Upstairs the rest of the organ sat opposite the pulpit, surrounded by a balcony full of the same seats as below.

In a day and age of megachurches in America and huge Christian conferences meeting in arenas in Atlanta, it doesn't seem odd to me that people would choose to worship in a space like this. There's great acoustics and a choir could have a killer show in a place like this. Man, bring a gospel choir over here- it's a near perfect venue for that. There are these back stairs that lead from the chancel's upper levels to a little backstage place where the choir could get ready before walking in. I've missed choir lofts. But this place is designed for a performance. It's liturgically planned for the congregation to come in and sit and watch. The fellowship hall downstairs is planned for participation.

That's not to say that it has to be used like that. Yes, it's ideal for lectures and concerts- it would be a great space for a conference on any topic. There's not even a ton of religious symbolism in the room- the walls are white and the skylights have cherubs on them, but that's all. And churches today, everyone's so creative. A person with a good eye for the stage could really use this space- there's a lot of potential there. I mean, there are all sorts of considerations to take into effect when you've got a space like this- I've often wondered how much it costs to heat a cathedral (because goodness knows they're always cold unless you're in Spain), and, again, with the flight of stairs to contend with, there's a bit of an inconvenience in accessing the space, but there's always inconvenience when you're doing some spectacular.

And that's what was happening with big venues like this were built. Spectacular things. But all across Europe, Christian is a thing that people have been. And you can hear stories of spectacular things happening in, say, South America or Asia or Africa, but the places from which we've been sending missionaries, they're mostly over this whole church thing. And it's going to take quite a bit of work to convince them different. I mean, there's a thousand different ways to do the work, the future being oddly similar to the cavernous building in Paisley. It's difficult to know your way around, but the entire space, it's full of potential, you know?

Glasgow Cathedral

The cathedral in Glasgow is dedicated to St. Mungo who is said to have been buried there. Anybody else think of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries? Good.

Pictured: Not a magical hospital in London

It's actually a pretty well preserved medieval cathedral, something that tended to be torn down in Reformations and the rejection of Catholicism. I can never decide how interesting I find the history of the Protestant Reformation with all its different sects ending up allowing for the thousands of versions of Christianity we have today. I mean, if we had cards, I'd be a card carrying United Methodist, but that's mostly because I'm good at joining organizations and the United Methodist Church in the states is an organized monster indeed. But more on all of this later. The cathedral in Glasgow is a Presbyterian, Church of Scotland place. It was popular during the Reformation to de-roof churches but this medieval cathedral survived and, though desecrated during the Reformation, the people of Glasgow willing paid for its repair.

And so I walked around inside with some kind of appreciation. Sure, the outside was covered with scaffolding, but the inside preserved the quire (choir) screen,

The thing that looks like a wall. Yup, that's a screen.

 separating the open nave from the pewed choir, and even if the stained glass windows were new, they kept up with the traditions of the windows, one belonging to the guilds of Glasgow, another to a wealthy family, each eager to leave a mark on such an important holy place. Again, I enjoyed the English on the walls, from being able to understand that this list of names was a list of those killed in a war and this list of names was a list of honored bishops of the cathedral. I loved picking out Bible verses and stories I knew from the words in the windows and floors. I love that a prayer for a guided path encircled the column in the sacristy and that Jesus' injunction to care for the sick, hungry, thirsty and imprisoned carried the theme of the windows in that same space.






I walked down to the lower church to see the tomb of St. Mungo and caught the end of a tour of the cathedral, pointing out an older Gothic column preserved in its decoration

and a chapel with brilliantly white walls used for weddings. I left the cathedral as they were setting up for a wedding in the upstairs church, giving space for a new life to begin while I walked slowly around the lives that had been ended, reposing on a nearby hill.

The Necropolis in Glasgow is modeled after Pere Lachaise and is from a time when the fortunes of the British Empire smiled on Glasgow as the second most important city in Britain. Names that I don't know of rich people who died long ago and not so long ago adorned tombstone after tombstone. A high monument to John Knox and other reformers sat on top of the hill with the best view of the cathedral and Glasgow and I smiled as a little boy ran up to it and turned to ask his father if it was a king on top of the high pedestal.

Right around the corner from the cathedral is St. Mungo's Museum of Religious Life and Art. It's got plenty of good stuff in there from the five major religions and I spent a couple of hours reading every plaque and thinking over every exhibit. I watched the wedding party arrive and leave from a second story window, keeping my laughter to myself as a group of older German ladies stepped in front of the window and cooed at the small boy in a kilt I had been amused by an hour earlier.

All of this is swirling around in my head, all these bits of religion that I've encountered in one day. On the one hand, you have an extremely familiar form of church for me sitting right out there, a ceremonial church designed for sacraments, inspiration and words of authority. Then there's a graveyard, familiar in its unfamiliarity with a monument to men that I recognize briefly but realize I could not tell their story. And now, here I sit, among Buddhas, copies of the Qu'ran, dancing skeletons and Shiva as the Lord of the Dance. Plenty of people think that if you're a religious studies major, you're on your way to seminary and that you're focused on their religion and a history of their church.

On my right I have a building to remind me of why they think that and on my left I'm surrounded with proof to the contrary.

Glasgow

It's not a bad train ride from London to Glasgow. I took an early train because it was literally fifty pounds cheaper and oscillated between reading and staring out the window. Tiredness and excitement vied internally- I remembered loving Scotland the last time I was there but I hadn't slept well in the large dorms in Paris and London and so, though I stared out the windows with anticipation, it was difficult to bounce around as one is said to do when excited.

Glasgow Central train station makes my top three favorite train stations (you know you're backpacking around Europe when you have favorite train stations). I arrived before my check-in time, so I enjoyed some Starbucks internet and watched the pigeons harass passengers before walking down a couple of blocks and catching a glimpse of the Clyde River before walking into my hostel.

Here's a hint, if you're ever planning on doing something like this yourself: If you have the option and the funds, pick smaller hostels. Big hostels might have... well... well, actually, the only thing bigger hostels have that smaller hostels don't is an excess of floors. You can find a kitchen, laundry and free internet at smaller hostels and in smaller hostels, you actually get to meet people. In a big place it's easy to get lost among the crowds of school groups there on holiday or packs of friends traveling together with no need for another person. I hate being excluded like that.

Thus, I was quite happy when I found myself in a smaller room than requested- I was in a four bed room instead of a fourteen bed dorm. Through lucky happenstance (by the way, did you know that our word happy has its roots with the older English word hap, or by chance?) I was in a room with, among a rotating door of others, two girls my own age, one of whom was a musician (the aforementioned Bec Sandrige, who you should go give a listen to now) and the other her friend just visiting in Glasgow for a few days to support Bec at her shows.

It's crazy nice to come back to a room with people you like to be around. It's ridiculous the amount of empathy you develop over the course of trips like this- I understand much better the feeling a body can have when you don't want to go home but you don't have anywhere else to sleep. And so I was, again, delighted to have good roomies. I went out to see Bec perform at a venue one night and loved it, and spent the rest of their time in Glasgow enjoying chance meetings at the hostel even after they had to book another room.


Other than that, much of my time in Glasgow was spent walking over to the Starbucks with the internet and catching up on things. I'd go down to the river on less rainy days, watching people walk, bike, stroll, skate and sit on calm paths that bore witness to the night's excitements the next day. I went up to the cathedral and wandered through the Necropolis, walked through museums and shuffled through shops, spending every day other than my Sunday when I visited two churches just outside of Glasgow with a friend, in town filling the time between the early sunrise and the late sunset. I read.

It's amazing how caught up a person can get in the news and thoughts of the world around them. It does not do for me to have that much extra time on my hands, spotting potential TARDISes that turned out to be ice cream shops and musing on my trip long before it's over. I spent an afternoon in a bookshop, having become determined to buy Looking For Alaska, sitting and reading from my two new books. I had to put Looking For Alaska down. The talk of summer heat in Louisiana made me homesick. I had to put the internet down for a while too. Thinking over the headlines made me worldsick.

In the end, though, I was glad to head on to Edinburgh. Eventually, even the destinations become part of the journey and you start to look at the days on the calendar like hours on the train, carrying you along to a not-too-distant end. Oh, distant enough, I guess. But approaching.

Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral

The annual cost of running Westminster Abbey is about 9 million pounds. (I was really hoping it would be over 9,000. Internet memes, anyone? No? No? OK.) That's why you have to pay 15 pounds to walk around and take pictures. It's the same kind of scenario for St. Paul's. Both places are free if you're just going in for a service or to pray, but that means that you can't walk around and take pictures. All this is fine by me. After all, they're primarily houses of worship and they don't charge people to come inside for a service.

So that's why you don't have a billion pictures of these two places from me, and also why my London album on Facebook is much smaller than any of the others. I get a little picture happy inside churches. It was kinda liberating, just walking into these two places and not feeling like I had to document every statue along the way. Which makes me feel like I've been doing this wrong.

So when I go in for services in a cathedral or a church or wherever, I tend to focus on getting to my seat. I don't know if this is because I'm actually excited for the service or if it's because I've adapted the "if I look like I know where I'm going, they'll think I belong:" strategy subconsiously. I motored into Westminster for the evensong service and slide into a chair beside the choir stalls without waiting for the direction of the ushers. I looked around and noticed that the vent beside me was used for the heating of the choir stall and A COLD DRAFT IS THEREFORE NORMAL. There was a sign. Apparently people had asked. I also talked for a second to the lady beside me who didn't speak or understand English particularly well. I knew where she's been and I wished I could help. But, as I always do when presented with paper and books, I chickened out and stopped looking around and read about the service.

The evenson service is particular to the Anglican communion. (I imagine Richard Attenborough reading this in a voiceover vis-a-vis an animal documentary.) It's a bit like a vespers service done every day. There's a gloria, a magnificant, a nunc dimittis (the prayer of Simeon, one of my favorites) and a time of prayer, plus an anthem by the choir. The one in St. Paul's was on a feast day, the one for Mary's parents, St. Joachim and St. Anne, so there was a sermon. You can have no idea how abusively wonderful it was to understand every word in the two services I attended.

I sat through the organ postlude at Westminster, wondering if the visiting choir brought their own organist, and wandered out much more slowly than I wandered in. I balked for a second on my way out the door in the choir screen, amazed to have stumbled on the grave of Sir Isaac Newton. I looked in the floor and saw a memorial to PJ Dirac, and began to study the place around me, finding Ernest Rutherford and JJ Thomson. I love finding these physical memorials to people that I've read so much about. I would have wandered over to the poet's corner but they walked us out of the Abbey. After all, the service was over.

The same kind of thing happened at St. Paul's, being in a church only as a place of worship. I'd walk around the outside of the building with that Feed the Birds song stuck in my head and when I finally went in for the service, I hardly remarked the decor of the place around me. I walked purposefully up to the man handing out the books for the service and found a seat and began studying the order of service and the hymns we would sing. When I finally allowed myself to relax and look around, staring up again and again into the dome and around to see the statues and symbols around me, I almost shrugged it off. It was nice, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before, and anyway, I was here for the service.

Now, I'm a little astounded at that attitude. St. Paul's Cathedral in London is nice, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before? And I've heard bells and I've listened to services and I've stared at arches and columns and domes and apses and I've visited and I've thought and I've been through this all before. But shouldn't each time I see a place be something new? There's nothing like St. Paul's. There's nothing like Westminster. But there are so many things so similar that it really takes a royal wedding to set the places apart.

So walk inside. Be amazed. Really, look around and be astounded at the things people have built and made. Realize you're paying for the history that's being preserved here and that history is no small thing to preserve. I want the people of our future to see these places as well. But realize, just as there are many famous people who have achieved wonderful things whose nameswe stumble over or confuse or forget, there are many famous places that we will mix up and each will eventually lose their disctinction in the busy filing cabinets of our minds.

And though this fate of the forgotten seems like a horrible fate, I don't think you have to take the worst of ideas from it. After all, isn't it better to have such an abundance of beauty that we confuse where we first saw it than to have an absolute certainty of a memory of the only place that beauty exists?

London

Do you know what the best thing about getting off the train in London was?

English.

Goodness, I love English.

Not the English, in particular, but I love the language with which they carry out their business. You might not know it, but two months spent in countries where everything primarily happened in a language you didn't quite understand wears on a person. All the signs were in English first in London. The announcements were in English. I could talk to anyone I wanted to. Really, the first couple of hours in London were almost joyous, basking in the beauty of my home language. And English isn't even that pretty. But I had missed its primary presence in my life.

I honestly can't tell you much about the places I visited in London or the things I did there. Life was pretty humdrum. I developed a walk down to the Millenium Bridge and over near the Globe and along the Thames for a good bit. I walked down on my first evening to St. Paul's, just to see how far I could go. The next day, I went farther, looking into getting tickets for a show at the Globe. I wandered around London for a bit then, getting over to Westminster and then Buckingham Palace. I loved the gardens around Buckingham, sitting and watching the people and the birds for hours in an unusually pleasant British afternoon.

My favorite things about London were the things I geeked out about (about which I geeked? Grammatically correct sentences are difficult to come by). The Milennium Bridge was in the background of a scene in Love Actually, I walked by 10 Downing Street, I walked by the Old Bailey and down Fleet Street, I looked up Baker Street and Portabello Road, I figured out that you could watch live video of people crossing Abbey Road, I discovered a TARDIS in the British Library and I saw a play at the Globe. Shakespeare's Globe. The noise my enthusiasm makes is "Eeeeeee!!!"

The play at the Globe might actually take the cake as my favorite thing about London. I was hoping they'd have a Shakespearan play that wasn't sold out that Christine and I could go to, but all of the evening shows and most of the afternoon shows were already sold out for about the next week as far as standing room tickets were concerned. The really pleasant man at the ticket office said that they had spots open for the midnight showing of Doctor Faustus on Saturday night. I'm a Marlowe fan as well as a Shakespeare fan, and Christine wasn't opposed to seeing a play about a man who sells his soul to the devil at midnight, so the tickets were cheerily bought and the plans laid.

We walked my usual walk down across the Millenium Bridge and over to the Globe around eleven thirty, still amazed at the way the light had lingered throughout the long summer days. We showed our tickets at the door and found our way into the theater and around the already gathered crowd to a spot by the stage on the side. Sure, we would miss some of the action of the play, but having stood through a few operas in our time, we understood the wonderful luxury of leaning. I took half a dozen bad pictures of the stage and the room and admired the zodiac on the ceiling as people gasped occassionally at the monster that would peek over the upper balcony. We were joined on our side of the stage by two young men of Ireland and we passed the remaining time before the beginning of the play exchanging stories of visitng London and talking over half-remembered summaries of the action of the story we were about to watch unfold.

The play started with loud drumbeats and music and prologue from a sole actor. Then we dove into Faustus' story and I was as fascinated as ever, listening and watching the listing of studies at which Faustus had excelled, internally waiting for the second when Mestophales would show up, because every play becomes exponentially more itneresting when there's a demon around. Show up he did, though inexpertly conjured, and I spent most of the rest of the first act watching closely the exchanges between Faustus and Mestophales, borderline impatient when other actors took up the stage.

Intermission came and, as the Globe has free wifi, Christine went out to look up some information on the play and I sunk down, leaning against the stage and talking about actuarial things with one of the Irishmen as that was his intended career. Funny the things you remember about people you meet momentarily. The conversation ended rather abruptly when Christine came back towards the end of intermission with a revelation, walking quickly over to our guarded spot by the stage, and announcing, "It's Rory."

Ten seconds of backstory on this: David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor in the British sci-fi series Doctor Who (the longest running sci-fi series if you count all its reincarnations, beating out Star Trek: The Next Generation, The X-Files, and Stargate SG-1- end nerd aside), went to stage acting and has been in some plays at the Globe. He's also doing Much Ado About Nothing with Catherine Tate, who played Donna, this summer and I think I might actually have died of happiness if I had seen that, a combination of two of my favorite British actors starring in my favorite Shakespearean play. But, pushing all that away, I had wondered if other actors from Doctor Who got into acting on the London stage in the off-season and Christine and I had both thought that Mestophales looked familiar, though we hadn't guessed from where.

So the second half of the play for me was spent geeking out at the fact that Arthur Davrill who plays Rory Williams on Doctor Who was less than a foot away from me at certain points. The real testament to how awesome an event this was is the fact that I ran over to Starbucks the next day to tell as many of my friends as possible what had occured and to enjoy their reactions of text-based exclamations. Beyond the fan-girl moment though, I was rather enthralled by the rest of the play, watching Faustus bother the Pope and kings alike, staring breathless at his final soliloquoy as the last hour of his life chimes away. It's a wonderful play, if I may recommend some English reading for everyone, and the story itself is fascinating to me.

The ideas we discussed in my freshman English class floated around my head as we walked back in the late London night. I almost think I could have stayed in that moment forever, walking slowly back with my head on ideas of grace and decisions and worthiness and my feet on familiar pavingstones. I caught glimpses of stars as we walked again over the bridge and I love that our minds can consider ideas as big as they are, that we can sit back and think on all of these wonderful concepts.

In a way, it was just another way of basking in the wonder of English, of being able to think and express myself in my language again. It's difficult to be percieved as intelligent when you don't speak language. I think of that, of my own bias against people who I'm sure are every bit as reasonable as I am looking ridiculous as they try to express themselves in a language not their own. I loved London, visiting Westminster and St. Paul's for evensong services, listening to sermons and reflections that, for the first time since Florence, I understood.

Beautiful understanding.

Notre-Dame de Paris

Did you know that during the second world war, they took the stained glass windows out of Notre-Dame and put them in storage, for fear they would get blown out? I've seen this in a couple of places and it makes me wonder  how they did that. Seriously. You've got three rose windows- one at the west end, the big one, between the two front towers, and then one at each end of the transept, facing north and south. And beyond that, there must be near on a hundred stained glass windows besides the rose windows. They're everywhere. Notre-Dame's a Gothic Cathedral. It's the example you think of when you think of Gothic architecture. If you're me. So I'm puzzled and astounded by the amount of effort they had to put into it. Grateful, though.

Did you know that Notre Dame was probably the first place to use flying buttresses? They weren't even part of the original design, it's just that the walls were thinner in the Gothic style and they started to buckle under the weight of all the stones being added on top of them, so the architects threw these things in and they got popular as the style spread. It had a while to spread- the cathedral was finished in 1345. Just think! This is a building that's been around for nearly seven centuries. And somehow, with all our changes in fashion and taste and style, we still find it beautiful. Or I do, anyway. Me and all the people lined up across the parvais to see it.

Did you know that in the French Revolution they took out all the religious symbolism in the church and made it a Temple of Reason? They actually thought that the kings of Judah were kings of France and beheaded them. They replaced Mary over some of the altars with Lady Liberty. This place, this church that's so iconic to us, it was turned into a place were you didn't pray to God. I mean, this says all sorts of fascinating things philosophically, but I have such a hard time seeing this space as anything but a church. I love the gargoyles, pagan symbols though they be, and if you hadn't told me those were kings, I wouldn't have known, and the saints lining the doors could be any old people from that time period- well, maybe all of them except for St. Denis.

Noted Cephalophore. 

 But inside, smelling of incense and laid out in a massive cross with those choir stalls and those ceilings leading the eye up and up? They actually used this place to store food at one point in time. Strip the walls bare and it becomes a granary. And that's what some people saw in the cathedral.

Did you know that Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame about a time period much before his? We get confused about these things- all history is history to most of us. He was alive in the 1800's, after Napoleon had restored Christianity to the cathedral and been coronated in it. But Victor Hugo wrote it about the end of the 15th century, I think. I love the themes Mr. Hugo talks about in the book- there's all this about whether we actually have free will and the problem with class differences and the objectification of women. He also advocates for the repair of the cathedral, which, in his time, had fallen into disrepair, without being entirely restored from the damages of the revolution, and preservation of historic buildings is something I can certainly get behind. The cathedral is the main character of his book- it weathers all the injustice and stands solitary at the end.

Other people have taken the story and put a different moral spin on it. Disney, not famous for preserving plot lines anyway, makes the moral of the story acceptance of people who are different. Not universally, of course- Quasimodo ends up blessing the union of Esmeralda and Phoebus, because the two pretty people are the ones that should be together, but, you know, Quasimodo's had his one day out there and can happily go back to his bells and his church without the oppression of his former master, having been accepted as a good friend to Esmeralda and Phoebus alike. Notre-Dame is really the actor who paved the way for all of this justice- she protected Quasimodo from death as an infant and she allowed Frollo to fall, giving Quasimodo life as an adult.

If you see Notre-Dame de Paris, the musical based off of the story, there's this overarching theme of justice for the immigrants, for the gypsies that have made Paris their home. They demand sanctuary from Our Lady, and liberation. The cathedtal is a safe place, more than it ever is in the book, where the gargoyles watch over Esmeralda, where in the winter it's not too cold and in the summer it's not too hot. The bells are Quasimodo's loves. Even if, by the end of the musical, all has fallen into tragedy, the words of the songs have made their point- the gypsies and the outcast bellringer are the heroes of the story, not the captain of the archers or the curator of the cathedral. The opening song of the opera says that this, the time of the story, is the time of cathedrals. Man has reached for the stars, to write his story in glass and in stone.




Is it an exclusionary story, the one written above the doors and in the stained glass of Notre-Dame? What does someone with no idea who these people lining the doorways see, what does a pagan see in Mary when she walks into the building dedicated to her?

That's actually one of the things that I notice most in the three versions of the story I'm most familiar with, Esmeralda praying to Mary. In the book, it's rather tongue in cheek- Esmeralda is deathly afraid while the cathedral is being attacked by her liberators, and Victor Hugo says that, in times of need, one always prays to the god to which you're closest. In the Disney movie, a wiser Esmeralda walks along the halls of the cathedral, asking for God's help for the outcasts. We get to hear from the good people of Paris too, asking for love and glory and God and his angels' blessings, but Esmeralda doesn't ask for anything for herself, just for those less lucky than she is. And in Notre Dame de Paris, Esmeralda asks for protection from Mary, but she also asks for the barrier between herself and Mary and between brothers everywhere be taken down. I think all the prayers have beautiful points to them.

I wore my Esmeralda skirt on the Sunday when I went to mass at Notre Dame. I carried it around Europe for two months because it was definitely, definitely below the knee, a flowing green skirt that reached halfway down my shin. It really saved me in Rome, making sure I could get into St. Peter's without suffering in my jeans all day. I was being better safe than sorry in Notre-Dame. Really, given the choice, I would have loved to walk in barefoot and fit the part of a gypsy- my skin was still tan from Rome and Spain and sunny days in the south of France and my hair has grown to a remarkable length, curling unruly along the way. All I need are some gold earrings and I'm set, total gypsy. And that's all I ever want to be. I want to be the other, the outsider, the underprivileged, the one deserving pity and the one commended for rising above the sorry lot life has given me. Then it's not me that has to change the way I look at the world. The world has to adjust to me and my claims to be fair. It's so much easier to be on this end.

I bet you thought I was going to talk about the building, didn't you? The famous gargoyles, not even half as old as the building itself, the flying butresses, the carved altar stalls and the pieta and the statue of King Louis XIII and the crown of thorns in the treasury? Or maybe about the saints outside the doors, St Denis and the statues of Mary and Jesus and Peter and Paul, or the saints inside the doors, the statue of Joan of Arc whose redemption from heresy was carried out inside these very walls? Maybe I would detail the services for you, talking about the intriguing sermon preached in French from the surprising priest who stood behind the lectern with one elbow leaned against the Bible in front of him or about the sound of the organ as it played, sweet and beautiful, throughout the building, just softer than the choir that sang on Sunday morning hidden back in the choir stalls, or about the procession from the sacistry, incense smoke leading the way through the tourists still filling the halls and up the center aisle between the chairs and back out again, standing in silence broken by music as the cross came into and left the sanctuary?

But I've seen so many cathedrals. I've been to so many masses. Without the words to differentiate them, they're all the same. And these churches, they're all laid out the same, they're all used the same, when they're used for mass. The difference between all of these churches lies in their stories, and Notre-Dame de Paris has so many stories attributed to it. They're stories that I hold dear, because I love each and every one of the renditions of Mr. Hugo's novel. I love his idea and his protest against the injustice he saw. I love the ideas and the themes explored by the musical. I even love the Disney version with the unquenchable hope of Quasimodo only momentarily displaced from his bells.

This church, this cathedral, inspired one man to write a story and that story has been adapted so that people can hear it anew and can focus it on the problems they face in their own worlds. And that's what cathedrals are for. Yes, they are places of worship, yes, they are places that display the percieved power and glory of the God that blessed each of these nations with enough money and might to build such a building, but now, after all the history that has passed between the building of these cathedrals and us, all these buildings have left are their stories, their proclamations of times gone by. But this place, this one cathedral more than any other, has allowed her story to be molded to benefit others, to benefit, in point of fact in all cases, the least of these and though the building and furnishing of this cathedral proclaim's religions benefit to those with much, that's not what Christ came to do.

I love a faithful church.

St-Germain-des-Pres et St-Sulpice

St. Germain of Paris, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, was the "Bishop of Paris; born near Autun, Saône-et-Loire, c. 496; died at Paris, 28 May, 576. He studied at Avalon and also at Luzy under the guidance of his cousin Scapilion, a priest. At the age of thirty-four he was ordained by St. Agrippinus of Autun and became Abbot of Saint-Symphorien near that town. His characteristic virtue, love for the poor, manifested itself so strongly in his alms-giving, that his monks, fearing he would give away everything, rebelled." It was for this awesome man that the oldest church in Paris is named.


St. Sulpice doesn't have the same kind of interesting biography, so we're going to talk about the gnomon of St-Sulpice. It consists of an obelisk, a meridian line that goes North-South and a little light from a window in the transept of the church that lets in a disk of light that moved up and down on the meridian and helps tell time. Unless it's raining. Which it often is in Paris. It was built at the initiative of a guy named  Jean-Baptiste Languet de Gergy,who has a really fun name to say, I have to say. There was also one of these set up in the Florence Duomo. They used them to help us figure out the calendar we use to day. Yay science and religion! Also, St-Sulpice? 2nd biggest church in Paris. 


Does this count as having done a blog post on these two churches? I mean, there are like three links and I'm fixing to put in pictures. Well, I just did, but you can't tell that unless I do a screen shot. Which I didn't think to do. So now I could have just lied to you. Also, what is that angel doing in the picture to my right of the gnomon of St-Sulpice?


This, this kind of exhaustion with the topic, is why you shouldn't visit more than one church in a day. I mean, maybe you can see two, if you're determined. But the thing is, I saw these two churches on my last day in Paris, and that was quite a busy day and anything I tell you is going to be pulled straight off of google, I can tell you that for a fact. I mean, I could tell you that it was raining that day and that there was a guy with a guitar on the steps of St-Sulpice and that St-Sulpice has a bamf organ... and that there's a cafe right across the street from St-Germain-des-Pres that was pretty popular with Hemingway. 

Also, St-Sulpice isn't balanced- the south tower was never finished. 

Paris has many amazing churches. Rome has many amazing churches. Europe has many amazing churches. You can spend forever in these places, seeking out different buildings and seeing new old things. You know what I'd love? I'd love the chance to actually explore these places. To climb up in the towers of the churches or back in the rooms we're not allowed to see. I've seen Gothic ceilings and arches and I've seen Romanesque and I've seen... pretty much everything you want to throw at me at this point. I want to explore now. I want to see how these churches function as churches. And that's something that a cursory visit won't tell you. That's something you have to, you know, actually talk to people about, set up appointments, etc. 


You know, something that requires effort. 

Sacre Coeur

Joan of Arc was the bomb. Can we talk about that for a second? She fought and helped beat the English in some battles in the Hundred Years' War before being captured and sold to the English, who tried her for heresy and executed her. WHEN SHE WAS 19. I can't even understand. I feel shamed just reading about her. And I was going to talk about her when I talked about Notre-Dame but I got distracted. The things I would have liked to achieved by the time I was nineteen.

What does this have to do with Sacre Coeur? Oh. Well, there's a statue of her outside. Here, be distracted from my lack of photo by another one of those virtual tours. She's the one on the right.

You can't take pictures inside of Sacre Coeur, the Romanesque-Byzantine basilica on top of the highest hill in Paris, Montmartre, where St. Denis is said to have walked after being beheaded. The doors into the church are flanked by a king and Joan of Arc. That's how awesome Joan of Arc is. She's on par with a king. The church was built in the 19th century, paid for by the people of France and built in reparation for the sins of the country in the recent war.

I wish I could show you the inside so I could make a Katy Perry Firework joke. It's a basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, depicting the Savior as caring and loving, as opposed to the one who comes in terrible glory on the Day of Judgement, which is what you normally see on the outside of churches. Really, I've seen so many Day of Judgement depictions. They're pretty easy 'cause then you get to put both angels and demons, virtues and vices, the saved and the condemned, in one place. Anyway. Sacre Coeur focuses on Jesus' heart, which is outlined with big golden rays of light. I can the Byzantine influence best if not in the domes, in the golden mosaics inside. (You should actually click on this link if you want to see the inside of the church.)

But really, I just wanted to be around the church. I wanted to be by the stairs that climbed La Butte, the hill that Sacre Coeur sits on and I only wanted to be there because I've listened to this song ad nauseam. Even though it's a love song, it talks about the stairways and how they're hard on the miserable. And I love that line- I have a bad habit of putting it in French as my Facebook status. I don't know what it is.

But then I actually went to Sacre Coeur and have added people selling things to tourists on my list of least favorite things in the world, coming in above Duke fans. Yes, those intrepid salesmen who shove cheap souvenirs in your face regardless of your preference in buying said souvenirs actually make the list above the Cameron Crazies. Now I hate for things to be ruined for me. It's like finding out that Han shot first and realizing that your life is a lie. This wasn't precisely on this scale, but I would love for a village of Bohemian writers at the turn of the century to retake Montmartre. And I would like for there never to be another tourist again. Ever. EVER.

I have these dumb noble thoughts about how the heart of Jesus is helping people and how He would be distraught to see the people on His hillside. Then again, maybe the people He'd like to help are already on His hillside. Maybe the tourists and the salesmen alike belong to the Sacred Heart.

But really?

Tourists?

You know, He could always care about people for whom I couldn't care. I've got a lot of learning to do.