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The People You Meet

Matthew and I dropped by the Pantheon this morning so he could see Foucault’s pendulum and pay his respects at the tombs of Pierre and Marie Curie. Afterward, we walked over to the next-door church of St. Etienne du Mont so I could pray again for my friends at St. Genevieve’s shrine, and Matt could […]

Matthew and I dropped by the Pantheon this morning so he could see Foucault’s pendulum and pay his respects at the tombs of Pierre and Marie Curie. Afterward, we walked over to the next-door church of St. Etienne du Mont so I could pray again for my friends at St. Genevieve’s shrine, and Matt could see it, and Pascal’s grave. Who should we run into crossing the plaza in front of the church but the Antiochian Orthodox Bishop Basil of Wichita, and Father Josiah Trenham of Riverside, California. They were on their way to a conference in Serbia, but stopped off in Paris to pray at St. Genevieve’s shrine. It was a serendipitous meeting. Fr. Josiah took the above photo (I’ve cropped out Matthew; Julie and I feel strongly about protecting our children’s privacy). I told them about one of the people I was going to pray for, who is related to someone Bp Basil knows back in the US; he promised to pray for her too.

Imagine that, though — in Paris, outside St. Genevieve’s shrine!

On the matter of the Pantheon, I just can’t get right with it, given that it was a church built to the memory of St. Genevieve, but stolen by the republican government and turned into a shrine to the Revolution, and to republican France.

Anyway, even if the grand Pantheon structure had remained a church, I still would prefer the little late-Gothic St-Etienne church to the neoclassical behemoth next door. Gothic architecture is so humanizing, I think; classical architecture, and its neoclassical variation, is so cold and overwhelming. Washington DC is one of my least favorite architectural cities because of all the neoclassicism. All those straight lines. All that rationality. Feh.

Tomorrow, off to Normandy with the boys. All of us but Matthew are sick, by the way. Lucas and Nora have been running fevers off and on. All this Paris has finally caught up with us. Matt and I spent a little time in The Invalides today — that is, at the Museum of the Army. But I will save that commentary for after I return from the D-Day beaches.

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