Bordeaux and Palmiers

After having lived in France for a bit more than a year, I took a school trip to Naples and fell in love.

I had always had a sneaking suspicion that I would love Southern Italy: it’s something that flows in my veins and, no matter how insignificant it may seem to some, it has always been an important part of my background.

One of the reasons I loved Naples so much was the way that religion was so much a part of daily life. It wasn’t gaudy or loud, the way religion so often is in America. Rather, in ran under and through everything, in the same way that the rest of history does. It had its place, as so many things do, beneath the conscious level of knowledge: everyone knew it was there, but like walking, talking and breathing, they took it for granted and let it languish.

France will never be a country like the Italy I experienced in Naples. France has already undergone the legislation that it took to separate Church from State, to make it a nation laique, and once you go secular, you don’t ever forget.

And yet, I wonder…

So many French people are “agnostic” or “atheist” or “nothing.” They send their children to public schools, and mass never enters their conscious existence. But what about the architecture? The Churches that appear on every corner? The art? There is an element of French history that is intertwined with Catholicism, and this is something that cannot be ignored in the same way it can in a country like America, built upon religion but since created through immigration, where no two people come from the same background.

Here, to be French is to be French, ethnically, nationally, historically. And if you’re French, you were most likely Catholic at some point, like the Irish, the Spanish, the Italians, the Mexicans. And if you were Catholic, even if you aren’t today, you might see a pile of these branches, the French answer to the palms bent into crosses that American Churches pass out on Palm Sunday and stop. And even if you didn’t go to mass that day, you may feel a bit of a twinge, a connection, in the same way I felt connected to a country I had never visited, much less lived in.

And maybe, just maybe, for no reason you could describe, you might feel called to grab a couple of branches, to carry them into the métro, to remember, just for today, the religion that got you and your people where you are today.

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