The Ring 💍 Paris

In the Latin Quarter

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~ 10 Years Ago ~

In his little room one block from the Seine, Albert knelt in front of a small altar to the Mother of God. He recited the ancient, inevitable words, not the newfangled German tacked up on a door somewhere in Saxony on the Elbe, and certainly not the English slogans so fashionable now on the bursting t-shirts of the dancing Madonnas and Our Lady of the Gaga dolls.

No, his words went back to the Latin and Greek, the Hebrew scriptures, the Aramaic script, and the Phoenician that gave it birth. Yet even that, he feared, was not the beginning. Before Byblos was Akkad, and before Rome and Jerusalem were Thebes and Uruk. Long before culture flowed along the banks of the Jordan and the Tiber (and later the Seine and the Thames), it flowed along the banks of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Saraswati.  

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At first, Albert was eager to take in everything the Church told him. Yet he soon grew tired of the gap between ideals and practices. He even grew tired of the promises of Vatican II. He wasn’t interested in historical attractions masquerading as religion, however beautiful Saint Peters or Notre Dame may be. He was wasn’t interested in doctrine or catechism, but in the structure of the system behind them. In particular, he wanted to measure the exact distance between possibility and probability. Anything might be true, but what was likely to be true? He was suspicious of any religion that tried to hide the mathematical calculations behind the Trinity, the Trimurti, or the Four Noble Truths. Why construct immutable doctrine if your aim is the ether of Heaven and the love of Humanity?

Perhaps Albert couldn’t help distrusting abstraction, or getting lost in numbers and percentages rather than in mystical paradoxes or Clouds of Unknowing. You see, he grew up in the Canadian province of Alberta, in downtown Edmonton, on Jasper Avenue. These are very down-to-earth places, with very few of the etherial beauties of Paris or Rome. Nor was Edmonton overburdened with history:

Albert was a small c catholic who believed that the Church ought to be open to everyone, and ought to be open to all forms of belief. He reasoned that the probability of integrity lay with liberalism and charity and not with conservatism and doctrine: which was God more likely to approve of, helping those in need or debating the Trinity? He saw the homeless and the drug addicts on the fringes of Jasper Avenue, and wanted to do something. 800 years ago Saint Francis would have given them shelter, would have opened the doors of his humble church on a cold winter night. Today, the charities of Saint Vincent de Paul and Sant'Egidio would rescue them from the frozen sidewalk, and give them something to eat. When they got old and frail, the brothers and sisters would nurse them till their broken hearts no longer beat.

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Albert first came to England to study at St.Mary’s in Birmingham. He was drawn there by its immense Glancey Library, and by the chance to spar with the ghost of Cardinal Newman. The Cardinal believed in critical thinking, yet not in liberalism. Albert couldn’t figure out how that made sense, even in theory. Surely the odds were in favour of liberal charity, given to whoever needed it rather than to those who had inherited the privilege of doing without it.

He thought of the Jesuit priests struggling in the freezing Québec winters and the torrid jungles of Brasil. He thought of the Liberation Theologists and how they stood up to the slavers and their wealthy backers. He thought of Bartolomé de las Casas, who saw firsthand the brutal rape of the Indies. De las Casas then listened to a Dominican sermon, after which he turned against the whole rampaging conquistadorial disaster. He wrote A Brief History of the Destruction of the Americas, which, luckily, caught the ear of the King and the Pope.

Albert knew that the Church was guilty of many abuses, but it also had its heroes and saints.

After a year of tussling with Cardinal Newman’s stubborn ghost, Albert felt a strong pull toward the continent, and soon migrated to France. He was lured by Rabelais and Montaigne, Montesquieu and Rousseau. He understood what Newman said, but he felt that Montaigne had arrived at a deeper truth 300 years before him. Unlike Newman, Montaigne left a huge space for doubt, and for other philosophies to enter the realm of possibility. To Albert this space was a necessary precondition for spiritual freedom, for no belief system could ever be probable without being possible first. If certain beliefs weren’t possible, however true they might be, then it was improbable that we’d arrive at truth. We’d all spin in our hot little bubbles till they floated up above trees and into the clouds, popped, and then fell back to earth.

Perhaps Montaigne allowed for doubt and possibility because the air in France was more philosophical, more influenced by Italian thinkers like Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno. Or perhaps it was because François Rabelais had already cleared the way for such French doubt. Both priest and doctor, Rabelais had shaken and liberated Humanism. He had also unified religion & reason in a way that was both rational and visceral. Rabelais’ outragious and free-ranging stories created a tremendous creative space for the French 🔺 to reconcile their practical lives with their abstract hopes, 🔺 to accept their bodies as well as their souls, 🔺 to stand up to authority, and 🔺 to freely mix Antiquity with Modernity. While Newman insisted that traditional religion provided the best way forward, Rabelais said, Fay ce que voudras, Do what you want.

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Albert was perhaps also drawn to Paris by the memory of the French spoken by his parents, who died in a car crash when he was 13 years old. He and his sister were the final fringes of a scattered family line that started around the time of Louis XIV, when the French left in droves to populate New France. His parents were also part of the westward diaspora, from Québec up the Ottawa River, to Saint Boniface in Winnipeg, and to the far-flung communities of the West.

His parents were born in the furthest flung of these communities, Grande-Prairie. Yet this is where the trajectory reversed itself: his parents moved eastward to Saint Albert (where Albert got his name) and finally to Edmonton, the provincial capital.

Perhaps Albert’s years in Europe were a way of completing the return journey. Yet he was always dubious about roots. Could you ever find out where you came from? Doesn’t everything come from something else? Even his surname, Musca, was a mystery he’d never solve. The name may have come from the Greek moskhos (young calf or bullock), from the Persian mushk, (the fragrance made from the glands of the male deer), or from the Sanskrit muṣka (testicle).

He thought the earthy Rabelais might like that. Instead of finding his place of origin somewhere near the hippocampus in his brain, or in the mitral and tricuspid valves which opened in his heart, it was more likely in his genitals. Religion had covered genitals with fig leaves and banished them from the Garden of Delights, yet for Rabelais they were its most pleasing fruit. And, if only the scribbling doctor could have known it back in the 16th century: testicles were also the storehouse of DNA, that strange little molecule that the Church had yet to explain.

And if it couldn’t explain DNA, how was it ever to explain humanity?

Albert liked that his name couldn’t be traced to one place, much like religion itself. Was he “really” from Quebec, France, Persia, or India? Where did the cardinals in Rome get the concepts of the soul, the afterlife, forgiveness, and Grace?

He told himself he’d come to Paris not to go back in time, but to go forward. But he also knew that just because he didn’t look at the prints his feet made on the beach didn’t mean that they hadn’t been there, even though the waves had washed them away.

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In his small room Albert looked up at the gigantic photograph of Jean-Paul II, who had been canonized several years ago. Albert loved the man, but he also wondered how the frame got so big. 

Next to it was a large photo of the present Francis, not yet transformed into a saint. Albert wondered how he suddenly contracted all those super powers. He was once simply Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Mario. Albert imagined him with his bright red hat, interdicting fireballs, ascending to the heavens, and hurtling bright green turtle shells from his popemobile.

Jokingly, he said a few God the father of mercies to forgive himself for his indiscretion. Yet, in all seriousness, what was there to forgive? Was the pope really so far above us? Was this what Jesus taught?

Albert thought about Francis' notion that the Church be open to everyone. The problem was, some people assumed that what he meant by everyone included everyone — including women and homosexuals. But Francis then added that this use of everyone didn't change the fact that women could never become priests and that marriage was only between a man and a woman.

If the Mother of God showed up at the seminary gates, she would be turned away, while men of harrowing faults were ushered up the steps and into the hallowed spaces of the apse.

Albert shuddered to think of the recent scandals in Boston, and of the mothers who sat in the front row while the priests intoned the sacred vows. These men who called themselves priests then proceeded, in the vestiary, to bring down the altar boys.

Why pretend to change and to love, when you won't even change enough to include half the world’s population?

His frustration with the slow pace of Vatican II led him out of his cell and into the streets of the Latin Quarter. His disillusionment also led him up the steps of the Collège de France, into the lecture halls where women were permitted to climb the steps to the podium. Hindus, atheists, Mormons, gays, lesbians, transexuals, anyone could speak who had something to say.

In the secular space of this unhallowed apse, they discussed things that the priests left out — things like universal rights, recent astronomy, sexuality, secularism, DNA, the right to die, the conundrum of biblical scholarship, evolution, and the 150 year-old deciphering of cuneiform.

Together with the Sorbonne, the Collège de France had some of the world's leading experts in Assyriology, the study of the civilizations that used cuneiform. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria.

Cuneiform itself fascinated him. It was a seemingly simple, 5000 year-old script named after wedge-shaped marks pressed into moist tablets of clay. We may not be able to see the footprints that individual humans have left in the sand, but we still have these strange blunt impressions that give us hints about who we once were.

Albert imagined the fingers of God pressing into the clay. Into the water and the dust. Moistened by the baptismal waters of the earliest rivers known to man. He thought of Langston Hughes' poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers":

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. 

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The Church was obsessed with Hebrew geography. Yet what did it matter if Albert read the old stories by the River Jordan or by the banks of the Nile? By the Ganges' side or by the rivers of Babylon? Why were any of them more sacred than the Seine, or, for that matter, than the North Saskatchewan, that mighty river that flowed through his hometown and across the prairies, more powerful than a cavalcade of horses?

But the Church was obsessed with the letter J. Jordan and Judaea, Jericho and Jerusalem. Job, Joshua, Jesus, Jacob, Joseph. Jeremiah and John of Patmos. The Jews.

Everything had to come from that particular tribe, that particular land, their particular book. Yet what did it matter if Albert read the old stories in the Bible — God formed man of the dust of the ground — or if he read them in the Epic of Gilgamesh — The Goddess pinched off a piece of clay and threw it into the wilds. She then fashioned a primitive man, Enkidu, the offspring of silence and lightning. What did it matter if the Hebrew Noah built the ark — Make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. [...] The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits... — or if it was the Mesopotamian Utnapishtim — The children brought pitch ... each side of the deck measuring one hundred and twenty cubits... . 

In one story Yahweh wanted to drown the world, but then he warned Noah. In another, Enlil wanted to drown the world, but then Ea warned Utnapishtim to build an ark. What did it matter who said what to who, as long as the Heavens relented?

What did it matter who was tested, Job or Gilgamesh, as long as at some point there was redemption? The one thing Albert held onto was that at some point cataclysm turned into salvation. At some point, water turned into wine. Long after the blood of the Sumerians mixed with that of the Akkadians, long after Abraham left the city of Ur. At some point, through the Egyptians or through existential despair, the flooding ceased, and the water turned to wine.

He tried to imagine an evil that couldn’t be redeemed. His mind went out to all the solar systems he’d never seen and never heard of. He tried to imagine an ocean so deep that no light could make it down to the bottom. But his imagination failed him, or his heart got the best of him, and he concluded that there could never be such a place. Dante, with his devils and his eternal lake of pitch, got it all wrong.

Albert held onto this hope like a wooden cross swept sideways in a flash-flood crashing through the Zagros foothills. He imagined that he was a friend of Noah's, but Noah hadn't mentioned anything about the weather. Or that he was a friend of Utnapishtim's, what did it matter?

Albert felt the currents of the Ancient World every time he imagined himself lifting the chalice and every time he imagined himself placing the wafer on a tongue. He thought of the waters of the Euphrates — or the Jordan or the Nile or the Seine, what did it matter? — mixing with the wheat. The wheat that was the body, and the water that was the blood. The blood that was wine.

Yet the Church refused to acknowledge the deep currents of those other rivers. Instead, it peopled their banks with blasphemers and worshippers of false idols. Then it pretended that the old stories came from the thin air of the desert. That one people, and only one people, journeyed from the desert to the well. According to all the popes, from Saint Peter to Jorge Mario Bergolio, only one group of believers, believing one version of history, could drink the water that was wine.

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Next: 🎲 The Borjès

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