October 25, 2009 Sermon

A Pilgrimage Made Together (Ephesians 2: 19-22; Mark 8: 22-25)

Marilou and Luke Mayba

LUKE: This past summer would be my third time in France. It was our honeymoon, our holiday, and our chance to visit one of my best friends, Cédric, who lives in Lyon: these were the reasons I was going; not to look for the divine in a faraway country when there is still so much to discover close to home, and so much about other continents that can be learned at a distance. On the other hand, Marilou had never been to Europe, let alone France and, as you will see, she was constantly marveling at new discoveries, places she had always dreamed of seeing, castles, vineyards, lakes in the Alps … and I would be there at her side, hopefully sharing in her enthusiasm. This would definitely be a growing experience for the newlywed couple!

Well, I knew that if there was one aspect of France I would appreciate seeing again, it was its small villages. Certainly, such villages are one feature that are all but non-existent in our country. France's villages are perhaps the only way to understand how a country with twice the population of Canada could have only a single metropolis, Paris, with its 10 million inhabitants. France's second biggest city is Lyon, which, with its one million people, is comparable to Ottawa. [Marilou: But statistics aside, I want to tell you about our morning routine during our stay in Lyon. Luke went out every morning to bring back croissants for breakfast. But on the first morning, the first three bakeries he went to were closed for holidays and there were signs in front of each saying they wouldn’t reopen until September! This was a clear illustration for me of the European mentality allowing people to relax and enjoy life and, if you want to take holidays, just close your business for 5 weeks!]

LUKE: Yes, our friend Cédric confirmed that big cities like Paris and Lyon tend to empty out pretty well during the summer months. But apart from these few bigger centres, the landscape is otherwise dotted by thousands of villages, some of which are so insignificant they don't appear even on a double-sided map of this relatively small country.

I liked the villages because they are finite in area: beyond the village limits, there are no gas stations or plazas or suburban shopping malls or big box stores; there is nothing but farmers' fields. Yet, sometimes only 5 km farther, there is another village, complete with its own identity and history. The proximity of the villages one to another allowed us to imagine what life had been like in a time when people couldn't travel so far so quickly: when it would have been a big deal to travel to a neighbouring community by horse and buggy; and yet when you were still never farther away than walking distance from the next little "civilization". [Marilou: That’s what we felt like during our touring. We only needed a car to get from one village another, but certainly not to get around inside the villages themselves. At most village entrances, there was a parking lot so we could get out and discover the community close up, on foot. In fact, most of the streets were so narrow there wasn’t really space for even the smaller European vehicles to be on the road!] Luke: We couldn’t help but think of these villages as “historic”: indeed, they are, in a sense, relics of a bygone era. No “new” communities are being built in France, as they have been here, to log trees, catch fish, or drill oil and gas. Yet every village church, every museum, could tell us what precise year significant events had occurred. I was impressed that such old dates could be remembered with such supposed accuracy!

Growing up in Canada, I was always a little bit incredulous by the suggestion that Jesus, for example, was born on December 25, in the year 0. (Though at university, my first year history professor told us that Jesus was actually born “4 years before he was born” – that is, in 4 B.C.) But apart from the Bible, I had never encountered a historical source that dated any event (close to home anyway) farther back than a few hundred years. It was as though human technology only allowed us to start counting properly beginning in 1492, but since then, thank goodness, our calendars have never missed a day!

Then during my trip to France last year I realized, while reading a children's book I'd bought at Mont Saint-Michel, that historians have kept track of the date of every king’s ascension to the French throne, all the way back to Clovis in 466. [Marilou: We got to see many of the castles royal people lived in over the years. As a visual artist and a romantic person, I’ve been wishing to visit castles since my childhood. I also studied a little bit of architecture 10 years ago, so I was wonderfully fascinated by the cathedrals and the castles we saw. I especially liked the windows, the light coming in through the stain glass, and the details of Renaissance style. Then I noticed interesting differences between the Gothic style and the Roman (or medieval) style, for example, in the design of the vaults and supporting structures. Every castle we visited seemed older than the last, yet no less luxurious! Most castles also keep much of their original artwork hung on their walls, which give us direct impressions of what life was like, at least for rich monarchs. They are not only castles, but art galleries!]

LUKE: I found myself wondering, though, why the houses of the rich were so well preserved and why there wasn’t at least one historic site dedicated to the life of peasants in the seigniorial system, to give a bit a balance. I guess the villages were as close as it got to learning about the historic lives of ordinary folks.

Of course, we have villages in Canada as well…whose fortunes rise and fall with those of the respective multinational company that employs most of their population. We don't believe these villages have much of a future, and most of us have left them for a better life in the city. Indeed, the Canadian population has been over 50% urban since 1910; while this is true of the world population in general only since 2007. Still, we learned that village economies even in an "old" country like France are struggling. With industrialization, the centralization of production and the rise of the service and high tech sectors, village economies are left to survive more and more predominantly on seasonal tourism. During the off season, sometimes half the population or more leaves town and some restaurants are only opened on weekends. [Marilou: We learned this information talking to the servers at one of the only two restaurants in the small village of Saint-Suliac (near Saint-Malo and Mont Saint-Michel). We had got there as much for refuge from the rain as for our supper. They almost didn’t let us in. It was 7:00 in the evening, and we had to be prepared to vacate our table for an 8:00 reservation. But it was certainly worth it to stay since, despite our long pants, jacket and umbrella, we needed to get warm, a big fireplace where they cooked the steaks in front of our eyes. It was certainly cozy, though quite surreal to experience in the middle of summer! Only the day before, we had experienced 35 degree-heat while touring the Châteaux de la Loire!]

LUKE: Thank you, Marilou, for adding the richness of personal experiences to my more economic and cultural “thesis”. In any case, despite the villages’ unstable economies, it’s equally clear the French people have a high value for their history and heritage. The old street and building architecture is stunningly beautiful and, though the insides of buildings are comfortably modern, some of the traditional village ways of life are nevertheless sustained, as though the villagers thought they were irreplaceable even by the most sophisticated contemporary technology. [Marilou: I had always thought going home with a baguette under your arm was a cultural stereotype of France… but we saw it! In one tiny village, we noticed several people going into the bakery in the morning and coming out with their daily baguettes, sometimes putting them into a bicycle basket and pedaling home.]

LUKE: Surely the enduring feature of French villages contributes to the popular designation of France as an "old" country. We compare Canada to France, by contrast, as "not nearly as old" or "a much newer country" Incredibly, it appears that British Columbia’s oldest building, found at Fort Langley, was built in 1840!

Yet I wonder whether labeling our country as “new” is really helpful. After all, there have been people living in our part of the world for much longer than France has been considered a country. The difference, perhaps, is that the French have more successfully maintained a popular concern for the preservation of their historic treasures. [Marilou: I was delighted to be able to visit the real places named in songs I’ve known since my childhood like “Du Mont Saint-Michel jusqu’à la Contrescarpe”, from a song called “La langue de chez nous” by Yves Duteuil, and a more modern song by Pierre Lapointe, that mentions “Place des Abesses” in Paris, which we found near the Moulin Rouge. And, of course, Notre-Dame-de-Paris is mentioned in several songs that we know. This was like a pilgrimage, looking at the map to find places I’d already heard sung about, praised in a sense!]

LUKE: In Canada and the United States, on the other hand, many Europeans arrived over the years attempting to remake this continent in the image of what they already knew. Native people who were not killed by wars or disease were told, for centuries, that their languages were barbaric, their customs were savage, and their monuments a waste of space. After all, how could we preserve relics of the prairie buffalo hunt when there were farms to be built on the same land? Or, more recently, how could a Mohawk cemetery be saved when the neighbouring golf course needed expansion?

We might start by recognizing the nature of this continent’s old treasures. I love the scene, for example, in the film Black Robe, where the immense forest in which the missionary finds himself lost is visually compared to a similarly daunting European cathedral. Indeed, a Vancouver Island play once made the remark that some West Coast trees were around even before Shakespeare was writing! And even these trees are young compared with the Arctic glaciers on which Inuit culture has always depended. One hopeful sign for me came last year when I visited traditional pit-houses in Kamloops near the Thompson River. Granted, they may not have been “original” old buildings—after all, such structures were never built to last all that long—but it was encouraging to know they were still valuable treasures to the Native people … and that non-Native people were interested in discovering them too.

I was thinking about all this on our way back from a crowded lake near the Alps on a super hot day … hoping we might one day experience the divine in our own country’s old treasures as much as my wife appears to have experienced them in France. I don’t know: maybe her enthusiasm could inspire us to discover, preserve and learn from our own country’s oldest traditions, just as, in 1970, Grand Chief John Kelly suggested was possible: “… as the years go by,” he wrote, “the circle of the Ojibway gets bigger and bigger. Canadians of all colours and religion are entering that circle. You might feel that you have roots somewhere else, but in reality you are right here with us.” * I pray that we have not lost all that is old in our country, that it is still part of our culture, and that we might embark on the necessary search to discover inspiration and wisdom from the authentic ways of living in this place.

MARILOU: I’m really not sure if Luke and I experienced the sights and surroundings of France in quite the same way. But it was nevertheless a pilgrimage we made together. Perhaps not in the discovery of a new land, since much of it wasn’t new for Luke. But instead as time spent together as a newly married couple. Luke: That’s true. We’d been planning this trip for quite a long time. We’re lucky to both be teachers and to have so much time off in the summer, but I’m still glad we were able to intentionally put aside these three-and-a-half weeks to be with each other. In as much as we traveled, visited and ate way too much delicious food together, we also learned a little more about how to negotiate, see each other’s point of view, and live as one, despite our individual uniqueness. We are thankful for this honeymoon pilgrimage in each other’s company.

* Quoted in John Ralston Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin (Toronto: Viking, 1997), 99

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