A day as a doorkeeper

Dora, The Bean and I spent last week on holiday in Paris, seeing the sights, visiting numerous playgrounds and enjoying the excellent French bread and strawberries, though not usually on the same plate. The traditional influence of "Paris in the spring" seemed especially powerful for The Bean, who showed a much greater interest than usual in the opposite sex.

He seems mostly to be attracted to older women -- six or seven years old, compared to his two years and two months. He shows no sign of any bashfulness, walking right up to his quarry, pointing at her and announcing to everyone in the vicinity, "Girl!". Then he studies her closely, lowers his pointing finger and declaims "Shoes!". English girls are usually a little embarrassed by this treatment, but most of the French ones seemed merely bemused, either because French girls are naturally more self-confident or because they didn't have a clue what he was saying. In fact his attentions were often far from unwelcome; one of the girls that caught his eye impressed me no end by confiding to me in English that she thought he was "very beautiful" too.

Two of the famous places we visited were Versailles palace gardens and Chartres cathedral. Versailles is of course impressive and, in a certain sense, beautiful; but it is a product of the "age of reason", from the seventeenth century onwards. To me its beauty seemed soulless, shallow and egotistical, a statement of pride and power over others. They built it that big and ornate because they could. A very modern sort of place, really.

Chartres was altogether different. I wanted to go there partly because Meditations on the Tarot is dedicated to Our Lady of Chartres. Surely the unknown author of the book must have experienced something profound there. I was not disappointed. If you ever find yourself in the area, pay a visit if you possibly can.

The town is an hour out of Paris on the train, far enough to deter many tourists, and we happened to visit on a Monday, which is the closest France seems to come to a non-shopping day. So there were no crowds. The building is magnificent; certainly the most powerful expression I've ever encountered of medieval Christian spirituality. Its power comes partly from its coherence; it was built in a relatively small number of decades at the start of the thirteenth century, and whether by luck or divine providence, has suffered very little from the destructive effects of wars, revolutions and reformations over the centuries.

A breathtaking story is told in the stonework on the outside of the building and in the magnificent windows, for whose appreciation (I assume) the inside of the cathedral is kept pleasingly gloomy. Between them, the windows and the stones seem to cover the entire medieval Christian narrative and world view, from Adam and Eve through to the gospels and beyond, reaching up to heaven as much as depicting events on earth. The cathedral is dedicated to Mary, who is everywhere as mother of Jesus and Queen of Heaven; and something of the reality she carries managed to seep through even into my hard-wired Protestant skull, so much so that I began to sense more fully than I have before (though not clearly enough to write about here, yet) some aspect of the feminine which is central to Catholic spirituality but which Protestantism woefully misses. Or perhaps instead of "aspect of the feminine" it would be better to refer to the spiritual presence of which human femininity itself (the girls with the shoes?) is but a reflection.

In some ways, our day was frustrating. The famous labyrinth was under cover, we could only stay for a few hours, and Dora and I could only go into the building one at a time, because when we took The Bean in, he decided the most fun was to be had by screaming at the top of his voice to test the echo. But even so, the day had quite a profound effect on me, and after digesting the experience in a long meditation the following morning, I spent the rest of our time in France feeling much more grounded and balanced than I usually do. Now I'm back at home and back at work, it is all slowly fading; today I'm closer to Versailles than to Chartres. But Ken Wilber writes about how "peak experiences" (sudden unexpected and temporary experiences of the numinous) can turn out to be "peek experiences" (glimpses of what will eventually become an abiding state). It all depends on how we integrate them, or allow them to be integrated in us by grace.

"Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked." Psalm 84:10, NIV.