Les émotions ou passions de l’âme

The first part of my class trip this weekend was to a real live monastery. While everyone else was busy being asleep on the bus from the train station, I was bright-eyed and chipper, listening to Medieval Baebes on my iPod and thinking about illuminated manuscripts as beautiful French countryside whipped by in plumes of fog.

Upon arrival, we stood around the gift shop for a bit* and then were ushered into the monastery’s chapel for mass. We got little worn booklets with the liturgical texts and sat on wooden benches complete with kneeling boards. I was captivated. The whole thing—robed monks, plainchant, incense, stained glass, being cold and feeling guilty—it felt like real magic. I will not lie: I reveled a bit in being able to read both sides of the Latin and French prayer pamphlet. It was blissful.

Towards the end of the mass, the Head Monk (he had on a great pair of robes) stood up to chant the Dominus vobiscum before communion, and I recognized it immediately. It’s the same setting we use in Rockefeller Chapel, only our cantor is the lesbian dean and we sing in English. Music kind of short-circuits these details, though, and I felt the connection before I even realized why. I briefly considered going up to take communion, because how would they know I wasn’t Catholic? I can say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin. Still, the idea of dunking a wafer in a spit-laced cup of blood-wine icks me out to the extreme. Plus, doing that would make me the Worst Protestant Ever, if I understood the French translation of Luther I read for class correctly.

I’ve spent the last few years as a nominal atheist. I don’t think I believe in God As Such, and my idea of the soul is way more Whitman’s body electric than Augustine’s city of God. But I still go to church. A lot. I usually say it’s for the music, which is absolutely true, but there is, and I don’t know how else to say it, an actual feeling about being in church. How else can I put it? There is something transcendent. There is ritual, and yet there is mystery. It makes no sense, and it still made my pulse race a little.

Can that be it, maybe? Is all a great, Jesus-y fake-it-til-you-make-it? Can you just stand there, smelling incense and listening to the familiar elongated syllables and the prescribed Latin and actually feel communion between your body and soul, and that can be enough God for you?

I don’t know, and I wasn’t exactly going to just pull aside a monk and ask. And as much as I wanted to take part, I would not lie by omission just to get a wafer on my tongue, let it into my body to fuel a quick thought, build some small part of me.

*Of course there was a gift shop. This is 2010.