Paris and London

This galloping girl has galloped around Paris and London and is heading off to Wales to make retreat tomorrow at the beautiful St. Beuno’s.

Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris

The past week has been an incredible adventure with great friends. I spent two and half days with my friend, Catherine, a member of La Xaviere Missionaire de Christ. She generously housed me, showed me her city, and welcomed me into her community for shared meals and prayer. She took me to Montmartre and the University of Paris, where Ignatius and his companions spent much time. I was fortunate to be able to attend Mass at the Martyrium of St. Denis – the location where Ignatius and his first companions made their personal vows to serve God – celebrated by a Jesuit friend from Canada. I visited churches, gardens, important squares and landmarks, and interesting shops (La Procure and La Bovida), and of course, walked along the Seine. It was a whirlwind visit and just enough to have a taste of the beauty of Paris (and what an appetizer!).

With Catherine at the Arc de Triomphe, Paris

Now I’m in London and have spent the past three days exploring the city, visiting a variety of sites to satisfy my interest in both World War II history and Mary Ward history. I was fortunate to meet the London IBVMs and enjoy dinner and conversation together, and I was delighted to spend a day with my Congregation of Jesus sister, Theo, seeing Mary Ward’s London together – visiting churches where Mary Ward would have prayed, the neighbourhoods she lived in, and of course, Lambeth Palace, famous for the daring graffiti she left for the bishop. And later, taking a riverboat jaunt to Greenwich, a DLR trip back westward into the city for a visit to Westminster Cathedral and a walk past Buckingham Palace (for a day’s grand total of over 28,000 steps, according to my Fitbit). Today, I spent hours in St. Paul’s Cathedral, absorbing the spiritual and historical legacy of that great building, and thinking quite a lot about Christian unity.

The stained glass in St. Etheldreda’s, London, where Mary Ward likely attended Mass

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

Tomorrow, I head off to Wales to make retreat, to finally slow down after a busy year (since last summer’s retreat) and spend some time with the sheep and walking the hills (unless my aching feet protest too much), absorbing all that I have taken in this last while.

The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt, at St. Paul’s

I think I’ll end this post with a lovely poem I came across in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields earlier this week, that accompanies the surprising and beautiful East Window, which is inspired by ‘Jacob’s Ladder’:

In No Strange Land 

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air –
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars! –
The drift of pinons, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places: –
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry; – and upon they so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.

You, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry, – clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Gennesaret, but Thames!

– Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

East Window, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London