The View From Monte Sant'Angelo

I am eating a mid-morning breakfast here, at my hotel on the peak of Monte Sant' Angelo, and this is the view east across the Adriatic. The morning mist that blanketed the sea is burning away with the sun, and I sit drinking cappuccino and acqua minerale legermente frizzante, saying my morning prayers and meditating on the beauty of it:

I have been to Sicily, and to San Giovanni Rotundo these past couple weeks. I have pictures to post and stories to tell, from there and even from France, but I've decided that the pictures are going to have to wait for a proper screen and software, I am not going to pick and post from thumbnails on my iPad.

I'm off to visit the Archangel, now that I've had my coffee.. Pax et bonum, all.




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L'Église des Jacobins, Toulouse

Two weeks ago, on the afternoon of the day I left Lourdes, I stopped in Toulouse to pray at the tomb of saint Thomas Aquinas, whose relics grace the mother church of the Order of Preachers, built by St. Dominic in the earliest days of the Order, founded in the 13th century to preach against the Cathars here in Languedoc. Little else of world import has happened here, before or since, in this sleepy corner of France.

I found it interesting that the church takes its name from the priory later established by the Order on the Rue St. Jaques in Paris, named after St. James due to the fact the pilgrims to Compostelle congregated there, being the major thouroughfare of the medieval city. Later, in the years leading up to the French Revolution, a political club met at the priory there, and took their name from it, also being called "the Jacobins." This club became famous for radical republicanism, and came to dominate the revolutionary government during the regicidal Terror. Robispierre was a member.

I find it ironical somehow, that the Order responsible for the Inquisition (Torquemada was a member) later gave its nickname to another group infamous for totalitarian terror. Is there some metahistorical poetic synergy there? I think there is.

Here are some of the pictures I took, mediocre though some of them may be:

The Tomb of St. Thomas

And the candle.

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View from My Window: Fribourg, Switzerland

The vantage is toward Bourguillon and Schonberg, two of my erstwhile stomping grounds. The church is of course the cathedral of Saint Nicholas.

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Tales of Rocamadour.. PART I

So, as I say, I left Lourdes last week and took the train to Rocamadour.  I'd read that Rocamadour is one of the most ancient Marian shrines in the world, a critical junction along the Camino de Compostelle, which I walked from Vezelay back in 2004, and which I am suddenly - and somewhat surprisingly; since until I think about this week, I'd felt absolutely no desire to ever do it again - feeling as if I may have to walk again, but from a different angle.  I thought I should go, and see the famous black virgin there, and climb up to the shrine on the cliff in the footsteps of Charlemagne and Saint Louis and dozens of other kings, saints, bishops, popes and millions of untold other pilgrims who have come there over the millennium and a half that it has existed.

So, again as I say, I embarked via Toulouse (where I stopped for the afternoon to visit the mother church of the Order of Preachers, and the Tomb of Saint Thomas Aquinas - !!! - pictures, some rather good ones, I think - soon to come, when I get my image sorting and storage issues sorted out!)  and then took the evening regional bus then another train to get to Rocamadour.  Along the way, it began to rain.

I got there about 9 pm, expecting there to be a village with some sort of selection of hotels there to choose from. But there was only one hotel directly opposite the closed station, and it was shut tight, and dark. In a spirit of mild abnegation, I decided to sleep out.  In the rain. No biggy: I have a sleeping bag, bivy and tarp. I've used the bivy frequently, but the tarp - a light, 6' x 8' - I've never used, and like a retard, have never even tested out.

There was an enclosed waiting bench on the far side of the tracks - which one had to cross on a rubber pathway laid across the rails with a lit warning sign that flashes whenever a train approaches - and the woods behind it looked somewhat promising.  I started to scout along the platform to see if there was a dim nook with good branches about on which to throw up my tarp.

I mucked about for ten fifteen minutes, and got well and drenched.  My anorak kept my upper body only damp, but my pantlegs were getting soaked. And I couldn't see anything obvious to pitch my tarp and bivy down on.  Damn frustrating..

It finally dawned on me that it was Saturday night, and that there most likely would be very little traffic in the station until well into the coming morning.. Why not just sleep in the enclosed waiting area, all nice and snug in my sleeping bag?  Genius. If you're gonna kick it like a hobo, you gotta do what you gotta do.

So, that's what I did.  I popped a sleeping pill, and went to bed on the bench in the enclosed shelter.

Next morning, I overslept.  I'd meant to get up at 8:30 and hunt down the church for mass, but screwed up my alarm and woke up 10:30ish, and groggily got myself together.  In the dark the night before, I'd assumed that the shrine would be revealed in the dawn, the impressive cliff would be right there in front of the station for me to just climb up and go to mass.

But there was nothing there.  Just that empty hotel, trees, and a few houses. What to do?  I had assumed that this being one of the most famous shrines in France, with a million and a half pilgrims coming a year, that 4mass would be easily had, even in the off season, just as it had been at Lourdes.

But here I was, and there was nothing there.

I was deflated.  It was like when I'd taken the train to Fatima from Compostella, and had expected a substantial station right near the shrine, but arrived to find a little dinky powdunk station 14 km from the shrine, that required a bus ride through the countryside to get to.

It was like that. I was screwed.  I hate missing mass, and this was a borderline thing - I should have done my due diligence, but I hadn't, and now I was out of luck..

I sat there, glum, waiting for signs of life.

About noon, a girl showed up.  Maybe 18, asian features, wearing a scout uniform and carrying a backpack.  Neckerchief, badges, the whole deal.  She came into the shelter, looks at me, smiles, and fires off a stream of French. I gaze at her through my glaze, try to smile back, end up with a sort of grimace and just shook my head. Now, normally I understand everything people say to me here. My French - not so recently "pretty good for a dipshit American" is on the verge of just being pretty good period.  But my mind had evaporated on me.  She looked at me pityingly, clearly thinking "ah, this guy is clearly some sort of mental gimp."

Yes.  That's right.  I sat wallowing in that deliciously familiar old sensation of mild humiliation and self reproach tinged with contempt.  It's been a long while since ineptitude in French has made me feel that, but I used to get all pruny bathing in it, back in the day, all the time. It was almost a cause for nostalgia.. But not really.

I decided to go see if I could roust someone out to tell me about the hotel, to get away from this girl scout. I was here, and I was going to see the damn shrine. I was not going to give up, dammit.

I went and knocked on the door of the house next to the hotel.  An extremely cheerful fellow with a round ruddy face, looking like he'd just stepped out of a Pieter Bruegel painting and changed into modern clothes, came to the door.  My mind clicked back into gear, and I asked him "ou est le proprietaire de l'hotel?  c'est encore ouvert?"  He grinned, and told me that yes, the hotel was open, but that the proprietor was visiting her family for Sunday and would not be back until four.  I could call her number, listed on the sign there.  I told him my cell didn't work in France.  Could he help?  He grinned again, apologetically this time, and said a client could call her, but he didn't dare, not when she was with her family.  The sign says she'll be bak at four.  Ah, can't call her, not even on behalf of a client?  No.  Sorry.  I was like, "elle va revenir a quatre heures, c'est ecrit en pierre?"  Sure.  Absolutely.

Okay.  I'll wait then.  I found the wall nearby and sat down.  A car appears and pulls abruptly in in front of the train station.  A girl and guy get out.  Late teens.  Both in scout uniforms.  He leans against the car, she leans into him, obviously digging his bones deeply.  I am amused.

Then, another car and a van pull in.  Disgorging more teens in scout uniforms. Over the next ten minutes or so, several more vehicles arrive, until about twenty 18-ish kids are gathered in scouting uniforms.  Two priests in cassocks drive in and drop off a couple kids and drive away.  The scouts - girls and boys - all socialize vigorously, eating lunch and screwing around with one another.  I am intrigued and bemused by the spectacle.

It's moments like this when the French strike me as being deeply other - familiar, somehow, but so very very not at all the same as us.  I was a boyscout, and made Eagle at 13.  Then, I basically disengaged.  Scouting in the States is very much a middle school thing.  Most kids - probably 2/3's or so - quit by the time they reach high school.  Cool kids definitely do not usually stick around.  It's definitely not cool to run around in uniform.  It's nerdy and definitely un-hip.  I think it has something to do with Vietnam and the hippies and the wave of cynicism that hit us back in the seventies..

But here, in rural France I was watching a co-ed group of strapping, attractive kids wearing rolled neckerchiefs and throwing scout salutes a eachother like gang bangers throw gang signs.  They threw their salutes like WW II British soldiers, throwing their hands up lackadaisically above their  shoulders with a loose wrist, like an SS officer barely acknowledging an underling's heil hitler salute; fingers in the three middle fingers up, thumb over pinkie below, just like in the States.

I was astonished.  Such amazingly artless lack of cynicism.. in teenagers. Astonishing, completely incredible.

Then they began to sing.  Sing.  It was like when the dwarves sang of the Mountain at Bag End.. They weren' t American style campfire songs, which are usually silly or comic.  They were singing about "le chemin" and "le seigneur," like something out le Chanson de Roland.

It probably was.  I tried to record it; but my camera battery was nearly dead and I could only take a few stills.  I'll put one up on the blog maybe, later.

Then, the train came.  Most of the kids got on it.  Five or six of them did not, and I realized that they'd come in uniform to see their friends off.  More salutes, they sing on the platform as the train pulls away.  I sit there mildly astonished, and somehow moved.

It happened all the time when I was living with the Philanthropotes (another group of vital early twenty something French kids who continually astonished, impressed and moved me like this.  I felt like an anthropologist amongst a strange people, a witness to all sorts of odd but profoundly human behavior that constantly surprised and touched me.

It's good to be here, in France.  I truly love these people.  They are awesome.

To be continued..



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And Before I Forget..

Here's that candle from Lourdes. One of the very last things I did before I left.
I have more pictures, and maybe a tale or two to tell, but I'm only dishing in succinct daily increments, here..

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Some Few Odd Images from Lourdes

These past two weeks I've been in Lourdes. I've ensconced myself in a rather threadbare but very cheap hotel, with balcony, ensuite bathroom, and a very friendly Kabyle staff. Until last Sunday, the last day of the pilgrimage season (which extends from Easter through the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, which is to say last weekend this year) there was a nightly rosary procession at 9 pm and then vigil mass in the grotto of Mirabelle where the apparitions occurred every evening at 11 pm, that I joined in praying.

It's been an excellent retreat, all told.

But I haven't been much in the mood for blogging at all, despite your divers requests to post. Tonight, I have been planning the next week's itinerary, have bought some tickets, and laid plans that will take me eventually to Maryam Ana in Ephesus, if all goes well. I'll try to post much more frequently now, as I will be moving about more or less every other day this coming week or so.

One good - or utterly horrible, really, depending as you look at it - excuse I have for not blogging is that I managed to destroy my laptop by dumping a drink on it when I first got here, which means I am left resorting to my iPad to get online. Sorting and storing pictures is thus much harder, and since most of what I've taken here has been crap, most likely due to my having jacked up my camera and wide angle by dropping it (nay, smashing it wantonly) upon the hard marble floor ein Sacré Couer a couple weeks ago.. well..

I'm now happy merely to have anything electronic left to post anything at all. These crap images that follow were culled from thumbnails. I hope they amuse all the same:

interior upper basilica

view of grotto from above

the royal keep guarding the pass

The Grotto of Mirabelle

the basilica by night by the grotto

the evening procession from above

Slovenia! Or Slovakia! Or Croatia! Or whatever!

the candle alley

I'll only note in closing that I think - no exageration - that probably 80 - 90% of priests i've seen here have been wearing cassocks, something that prior to experience of the Legionarries would have made me ecstatic, but now merely makes me quizzical and mildly amused.

 

 

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Rue de la Grotte, Lourdes, France

 

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Lourdes: The View from My Window

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Photo Essay: Notre Dame de Chartres

After quitting Paris, I made my way to Chartres, to see the famous cathedral there.  I arrived at night, and took a few pictures of the exterior illuminated:

Next day, after sleeping in a big ivy patch under the low hanging branches of a great pine tree on the lawn of the Eure et Loir departmental prefecture (I had to hop their fence, and then got yelled at in the morning by some woman bureaucrat from the window of her office, when jumping back out onto the street) I went back and took some very mediocre images of the interior.

The inside is being restored, and maybe a tenth of the interior marble - besmirched with centuries of candle smoke and other dirt - has been bleached its original white, most of that in the sanctuary and front of the nave:

Note the contrast between the restored and dirty marble.

Plaque memorializing Peguy's pilgrimage here.

The cathedral is beautiful, a huge interior space with incredible stained glass.  Because of the dirty marble and cloudy day light, the church was darker than I expected it would be.  I still was awed, and sat there for three hours, said my chaplet and then just gaped, drinking it in.

I then did the tour of the place. There are these amazing wooden relief statues on the choir screen, figures in late medieval garb, carved in the 16th century, also being restored:

Restorer at work.

 And these are the famous flying buttresses:

I lit two candles at Chartres, the first to Ste. Therese here,

And another before ND de Cartres, her statue being on that pillar on the left there.

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