Third Sunday of Lent

Last night I attended "Peine d'amour perdue/Love's Labours Lost" with my Canadian Counterpart in Nice. It was a nice show, well acted, and I even laughed several times in spite of the language barrier. Trying to keep up with the story was beaucoup des peines, but being able to truly get into the rhythm of the French language was an amazing experience. Here in Angloworld my French is typically interrupted in English, at work I mostly hear English with smatterings of French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian and walking through town there is the constant bubbling sound of the French language, but no true immersion. However, attending the play was easily the most intense and longest lasting French immersion experience I have had yet.

I got home well after midnight, so it was difficult for me to get out of bed in time to make it to church this morning, but I did it. The final motivator was remembering that I won't be able to attend any church next Sunday as I will be someone's guest in Marseille and I will have Damian with me. I think it might be both difficult and a bit rude to drag other people to attend a church I don't normally attend in a city where I don't actually live. Anyway, the service was fine. Just morning prayer. I met a nice young lady from Stockholm who says she has just moved to Cannes and decided to check out the church out of curiosity.

The sermon had an interesting note that basically underlined some things I heard at Taize: there is no type of person in this world or any sin so terrible that they are barred from the Grace of God. It's interesting that I have heard that same lesson twice in less than a month and yet growing up in the US there always seemed to be qualifiers for God's Grace. While I believe that this is true for God, I find it nearly impossible to believe that other people are kind enough to adopt the same notion for others. Not only do most people come with qualifiers as to the sorts of people they want to have in their lives (I include myself in this statement), but most religious people I have met in my life seem to have a mental checklist of the types of people they would rather not be blessed with God's Grace or people they simply cannot believe will be allowed in God's presence. Maybe it's just PTSD from growing up in the Bible Belt and seeing a lot of screaming about Jesus, fire and damnation on television rather than intelligent conversations about faithful living. Even though I was raised in a lovely little church that strayed away from the typical Southern messages, I have very early memories of feeling shunned by other Christians for many reasons (being Anglican in a Southern Baptist world, coming from a broken family, my liberal ideas, and later my own marriage), so I still often feel unable to trust people in religious settings for fear of judgement.

Anyway, I'm sure the message was meant to bring hope, but for some reason it got me feeling really blue today. Maybe I just need to find some silence, something that has been completely absent from my life this week between my students, my busy apartment, the liveliness of the church I've been attending (that's a good thing overall), crowded buses, motor scooters, the recent development of howling winds and crashing waves due to spring storms on the Med, and the list goes on... There really is no silence in Cote d'Azur.

On that note, I'm going to try to use this rare semi-quiet moment in the apartment to relax and maybe regain some of my centeredness (is that a word?), which will most likely result in a nap :)