Author's Note: This is the first part of a two-part series.
As soon as I walked inside the Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière, I understood how Ken Follett, despite being atheist, was inspired to write the masterpiece "Pillars of the Earth," a book centered around the building of a cathedral.
It wasn’t the first cathedral I’d ever been in; it might not have even been the largest. But there was the light glowing through the stained glass, the gold leaf glittering along the impenetrable walls, and the organ echoing in the arched depths, and it was all so very sublime and heavenly — even if the second organ player’s skills were somewhat short of divine.
The Basilique de Fourvière is not terribly old as far as cathedrals go, and its relative modernity endowed it with a lasting splendidness. Father Philip from "Pillars of the Earth" was in my mind as I gazed up into the soaring heights of the canopy, and it was so very easy to see how one might feel close to the heavens, sitting there in those hallowed halls. Everything there was built with the intention to awe, and it succeeded. Tourists milled around, but under the high-vaulted roofs, I felt a calm loneliness, and something took flight from my heart and soared through the brilliant blue glass into the sky beyond.
All of this, I thought, as I wandered down the pews, snapping pictures as the dim light permitted; all of this magnificence was inspired by and built on a foundation of faith: faith in a God that does not exist, faith in miracles from the eponymous Our Lady that never occurred. And all of AP European History came back to me too, and I thought of how this was all as much of a political statement as a religious one, how an ambitious priest could rule the populace from his altar.
It is often the people you meet on trips that define a place, and this was such a case. I would therefore like to take a moment to discuss the priest in charge of the Basilique.
The good Father welcomed me with a smile when I first stepped carefully through the doors of the solemn edifice, trying to discretely finish my croissant. I’m not sure what exactly gave me away, but he asked in excellent English if I was American; I said I was and promised to keep to the periphery of the cathedral. This left me gazing around at the walls and the mini-altars in their still beautiful, if less glorious alcoves. My eyes passed over the medieval-looking stained glass, the Romanesque-inspired carvings and a rather stereotypical oil painting of Jesus.
I wandered over to a billboard in the back of the room, intrigued by a large poster that displayed the Chinese character for love. There was a large collection of Chinese flyers, in fact, and since I still hadn’t finished my croissant I picked out one to read. The priest came over to me then and asked me, in Mandarin, if I spoke Mandarin.
That was probably the last thing I expected to issue forth from the priest’s mouth (aside from “Did you know that God doesn’t really exist?”), and I almost forgot how to speak Chinese myself before stammering out an affirmative and a compliment for his Chinese fluency.
As it turns out, Lyon has a large population of Chinese immigrants, mostly university students, and this priest had decided to learn Chinese to be able to better serve the Chinese Catholic community.
In French, I told him about interning in Grenoble, in English, he talked about practicing Chinese with the friends he invited over every Saturday for lunch; thus, we had a delightful conversation flowing between three different languages.
And throughout it all, there were no questions of my religious affiliation, no evangelic attempts, not much discussion of religion at all. I really did appreciate that, and the exchange humanized my perception of priests; previously I saw them more or less as historical relics, clinging on to outdated traditions and fashions. But this priest, this basilica, this city of Lyon had successfully transitioned into the modern age while maintaining centuries-old traditions and beliefs (and robes).
If only all religious figures, past and present, were more like him.
