Sixteen Years Ago Today: Excerpts from an Unintentional Conversion Diary

Really it’s a travel diary, and I’d forgotten all about it. In the summer of 1993, expecting our first child, my husband and I spent three weeks in France and Germany. Our aim I suppose was to prove to ourselves that having children wasn’t going to tie us down. We’d been married for three years, and though we thought of ourselves, self-congratulatorily and short-sightedly, as long-married folk, we did a very newlyweddish thing: we kept a diary together, handing it back and forth as we puttered our way through a succession of cities in a rented Renault Clio.

The other day, sixteen years, four children, and nine mailing addresses after the fact of this trip, my husband pulled our long-buried notebook out of a moving box and sat down at the kitchen table to read it aloud. I expected to be annoyed by us; I especially expected to be annoyed by my twenty-nine-year-old pregnant graduate-student navel-gazing narrative self. There is some of that, but I’ll spare you.

What struck me, though, overall, was the amount of detail we’d managed to capture, of sights and experiences of which we now have no active memory, even though sixteen years isn’t that long a time to remember something. We have photos of the trip, of course, hundred of them, somewhere in another box, but a photo can tell you only what you saw. It can’t tell you how you saw it, what you thought about it, what the piece of the visible world at which you pointed your camera meant to you then, why you looked at it and kept on looking, why it should have any meaning for you now.

I was struck by another thing: the pull of the Church on our shared imagination. It didn’t surprise me then, and it doesn’t surprise me now, that my husband should have recorded many, many, many details of the many, many, many churches we visited. He was, and is, a theologian by training. When I took up with him in the late 1980s, he was just back from a year and a half at the University of Goettingen, reading Barth in the middle of an M.Div at Emory. Years later in England, where we lived for the duration of my husband’s doctoral work, one of our sons — three at the time — would sum his father up with some accuracy and no little disgust: “Dad’s so boring. He’s always lounging around in cathedrals.”

I was surprised, however, by myself. My own relationship, at twenty-nine, with belief and the things of the Church can best be described as “deliberately skeptical.” Methodist by upbringing, Episcopalian by choice — well, “choice” says it. I had gone to church all my life, without interruption, and also without any well-formed notion about God, except that I was doing Him a favor by believing in His existence. Certainly He had no right to demand anything of me. He was there, and I was here, and on went the world, merrily merrily. Graduate school of course didn’t help much. I remember once being taken to lunch by an eminent poet with whom I was studying — his idea of teaching a class, actually, was to say on the first day, “If you write some poems this semester, call me up and we’ll have lunch,” and that was it — who turned to me abruptly in the car on the way to the restaurant and said, “You don’t actually believe that stuff, do you?” We’d been talking about my husband’s pursuit of Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church, and to my enduring shame I replied cravenly: “Well, he does his thing, and I do mine.” This wasn’t strictly, absolutely true, but it was true enough.

I would not have said in those days that God was calling my name in any particular way, except to give me things that I wanted, chiefly a baby. I’m not sure I even thought that I owed any particular debt of gratitude for that. I was young, I was healthy, I wanted a baby, so of course I was having one, because and when I wanted it. What else could I possibly deserve? And having gotten what I wanted, I was absorbed in worry about what it would do to me: sap my time and energy, change my identity, compromise me in some way against my will. All of this seems beyond stupid to me now, but it was how I thought then. I wouldn’t have put it this way, maybe, but what I believed was that God had no right to do anything to me that I didn’t ask for.

It would be years before I would even begin to think differently. Still, looking back, I can see that even then something was at work. Sixteen years ago today, in Paris, in the midst of details about taxis, hotels, shop windows and food, I wrote this about the church of Saint Germain des Pres, still one of my favorite churches:

Inside, someone’s practicing thunderously on the organ — I couldn’t identify the music if you paid me. We tiptoe around the ambulatory, looking at the chapels. It’s dark, and the candles people have set in front of the saints burn ghostly bright. My favorite chapel is Saint Germain’s, himself. It seems darker than the others, with narrow, obviously-old red and blue glass windows. Icons lean against the walls, and there are candles everywhere, even in scrolls of stonework. It all seems very mysterious and overpowering.

One of Saint Germain’s admirable characteristics — apparently I read French better than I thought I did, but that’s not saying much — was that he did not disaffect his ascetic lifestyle or dress upon coming to Paris (in 555 or whenever). An incorruptible kind ‘o guy. Charlemagne admired him.

What charmed me about Saint Germain then is what still charms me about the saints: holiness, yes, but that holiness has quirks. Personal holiness is just that, both holy and personal, a reflection of an individual created will bent to God’s will without being bent out of shape — stubbornness, for example, remade as humility. Really I think I was as taken by the French phrasing as I was by anything I actually learned about St. Germain; I’m almost certain that what prompted me to remember and write down this detail was the word “disaffect,” the fact that St. Germain did not do it, and that Charlemagne, centuries later, admired him for it.

I’m writing this now in a break from packing for a trip home to Memphis, a task I need to resume. But over the next few weeks, as I reread this diary, I think I’ll alternate the eBay weirdness with more excerpts, as they seem to pertain to whatever exactly the subject of this strange blog is.

In the meantime, not that either the church or the saint especially needs my high opinion, but we do have this ratings system . . .

[Rating: 100 out of 100]