Tea with Annemarie

I hardly know how to type on an A;erican co;puter any;ore. I keep ;aking ;istakes.
I had tea with Annemarie, two of her friends, and the student from Minnesota who’s staying with her family. It just so happens the Minnesota girl has cousins from Peachtree City. She says she loves it there. Then Annemarie asks us if Atlanta was a very beautiful city. What do you say to that? Ok, I guess the short answer is “No, not really.” Paris is a beautiful city. Rouen is a beautiful city. Washington DC is a beautiful city. Savannah and Macon are beautiful cities. Maybe I just keep equating beautiful with old. But Atlanta is, well, a dirty urban sprawl monster that’s a nightmare to drive in. Forgive me, my hometown, but the truth hurts.

But it has its moments. I mean, any city looks pretty in the twilight pictures they take for postcards. And there’s the Fox theatre. And the view from the top of the sundial at night when all the tops of the buildings around are solitary, neighboring temples at the summit of mount Olympus, in another dimension.

Anyways

Once everyone else had left, Annemarie filled me in on a little of what they’d been talking about (conversations are still hard to follow, especially among people under thirty years of age). Apparently she’d had a somewhat sudden, painful breakup with a boy she was very much in love with, who is now calling her again and saying he made a mistake, he made it painful on purpose so it would be a clean break, but “il n’avait pas encore tourné la page.” That is, he never got over her. She’s very much hoping he’ll ask her out again, but he’s leaving to do an internship in London in three months and she doesn’t know if it will all work out. What could I do? I told her my love story. She seemed encouraged (though a little shocked, surprised, and amused that I’d been broken up with when a certain someone decided he was an atheist, and was almost broken up with again when he thought he was called to the priesthood.) I I hope it all works out for her…

We both had places to be at eight. After doing lunch with that one couple last Sunday from 12-5, having tea today with Annemarie from 5-8, and having had dinner at Pierre’s that one night from 7pm- 1am, I realize you could really spend your entire life eating at people’s houses in France, if you had enough invitations.

I went to Ecole de la foi (School of (the) faith). They crammed an amazingly thorough overview of the bible into an hour and a half. And I understood most of it! They went over the basic general progression of events, different translations, why we have more books than protestants, why all the gospels and slightly different and how, all the different sources for the old testament, how all the different books of the bible belong to different genres and you have to read them slightly differently, all the different ways you could interpret the Bible etc etc etc… it was amazing! If I keep going to this every other week, I might just be able to approach understanding what my better half will be studying J

And we prayed afterwards in the chapel, inviting Mary into our lives to help guide us through reading and understanding the Bible. And that was awesome. But the really cool part…and yeah I’m a geek but it kinda sent shivers up my spine…as I was leaving, I passed a big poster sized print of sepia tinted photograph of a lady with long hair. It took me a few seconds to process what it was: Ste. Thérèse of Lisieux in the role of Ste. Joan of Arc. Not ten meters from the place where Joan of Arc herself was martyred, in a church named for her.

No work today. I called the phone company and I will have a ligne fixe (land line), they tell me, no later than November the 7th. I hope they don’t have ties with my bank. I still haven’t received my check book, and the other day, when I tried to use my bank card for the first time, it wouldn’t work, either at the cash register or the ATM. I had to put back my groceries and breath deeply, reminding myself that God’s taking care of me, even if I only had five euros in my purse and no way of getting to the rest of my money (don’t worry, mom, it’s working now. Everything is fine. Breathe.)

Today Anne came to chez moi to record a radio broadcast. Turns out the Centre Diocesan, where I live, is also where they broadcast the Christian radio station in Rouen, and Anne came to talk about the concert on “Halloweens,” by the French Christian Reggae group, Spear Hit (say it fast, you’ll understand). I got to watch Marc. He was a little fussy, but we were ok. It’s amazing…I’m still kinda scared, having responability for such a little baby even for only a few minutes with his mom just in the other room, where we can both hear her voice, in fact, but she deals with him 24/7- and she’s only two years older than me. Yeah, mom, I know you had me when you were even younger than I am. I’m hoping all the taking care of kids stuff just switches on when you get pregnant (or your wife does).

Anne is incredibly open and talkative and friendly. And she is completely confident and comfortable saying things like, “I’ll manage somehow. I have the Holy Spirit working with me,” and asking me to pray for her while she was recording. And it’s completely natural…she’s not trying to be “pious,” this is simply her mode of thinking. She marveled that the person interviewing her, who works with Catholic teenagers, seemed surprised at her saying things like that. I guess I’m a little taken aback that she’s French, and Catholic no less, and saying things like that.

But it’s awesome.

It turns out she and ____have a baptism to go to Saturday morning in a town just next to the one where TR lives. So they’re giving me a ride! Rock on!

Tonight: Fais-Le Avec Christ (FLAC), a group of young people who meet and talk about Jesus. Praise and Worship stuff too, apparently, a lot of it. Never felt entirely at home with Praise and Worship (never know what to do with my arms and legs) so I don’t know if I’ll go back, but I’d love to see them all again. This was a mixed group of Protestants and Catholics.

I have a confession to make.

I love protestants. You do great things. You love God. Great. But when I do ecumenical things, part of me is afraid of putting my Catholic identity in second place, like I have to shove Mary and the Real Presence in the closet or something. I think this comes of living in the South, where, no matter how accepting and open and welcoming are, you feel like other Christians are tolerating your Catholicism, with a great deal of GRACE! Not that GRACE! isn’t wonderful and I’m not happy to help anyone get it any way I can. It’s just…well, in the United States, Christian tends to mean Protestant. We all objectively know Catholics are Christian too…but even still… when I said that we had a Christian radio station here, did some of you wonder what it was doing in the Catholic diocesan center? Broadcasting shows about celebrating the Eucharist? I’ll admit I did. Here, if you say Christian, people think Catholic. Someone told me today that sometimes they try to explain they are Protestent to people and those people have to get them to explain what Protestant is. They usually know that some sect of Christianity besides Catholicism exists, but they’ve never seen enough of it to understand. I hope none of them feel cut off there.

By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, I have a bit of a persecution complex. More about that later.

Français du jour:

* T’es ouf, toi? (verlan-“fou”)- Are you crazy or what?
* Ciemer- “merci” (verlan)
Secte- cult (I think). This is the reputation evangelical protestants have in France, though undeserved, because of some groups that exhibited…
Débords, excès- excesses, or things that go a little overboard
On a passé un bon moment- we had a good time.
Prendre du recul- to take a step back and take time to think about something.
Reculer: to back up