Pierre de Mareuil, chaplain extraordinaire

Catching up with a friend after 20 years at the conclusion of a 9 hour Seattle/Paris flight is a lesson in humility. I am always pale and crumpled when I come out of such flights, and tired enough to feel I am floating inside my own body… And I have not got any younger, obviously, since the end of the last century, which is the time I was a student with Pierre at the Faculté protestant de théologie in Paris.

Pierre is a chaplain at the Charles de Gaulle airport and he looks surprisingly like the Pierre I knew. Same bright smile, same slender figure with long legs that now allow him to walk by lost souls and guide them to their boarding gate and/or the shore of spiritual solace. We arranged our meeting via Facebook messenger.

" You did not change at all!" he declared, establishing in one sentence that he was both a tactful gentleman and a heck of a liar.

We sat together for  breakfast in the vast cafeteria reserved for staff.

Pierre is fluent in English. Irvin explained his work with the Presbyterian church (USA) where he supports Native churches in the country. Pierre asked us if we knew about the Toba Indians.

Pierre spent a year in Argentina as a student and that’s where he learned about this Native tribe. They discovered the Gospel through a travelling missionary who shared his passion for Jesus with them.

The missionaries that came later expected to teach those Natives everything they should know. Instead, they were welcomed with very specific requests. “We are already organized in parishes but we need to learn more about the Bible.”

“The Tobas are our missionaries. We learn about the Gospel from them!” commented one of them, impressed by their faithfulness.

Pierre wrote his Master dissertation on the Tobas, and in English! Irvin and I are looking forward to reading it.

Pierre is not on his own in this airport that covers 25 miles. An imam, a rabbi, a priest and several pastors team up to look after the travelers and those who work there, sometimes walking miles and miles so they can be where they can be supportive.

Knowing they are present every day in the midst of stress, worry and possible dramas is comfort in itself. 

Raphaël Picon

When news, good or tragic, hit us, we remember our surrounding with great precision. Where were we when a man walked on the moon… when we heard that lady Di had died… when we saw the images of 9/11 for the first time…

I was sitting with Irvin in a Starbuck in Orlando, in Florida, the day before we flew home. I was absentmindedly looking through facebook on my phone. On my French friends pages, I saw several times pictures of a young man with blond hair, smiling. Before I could even read the captions, I understood and felt my heart sink. Raphael Picon had died.

Raphael was a theologian and a pastor who had spent several years in the US with his family, pastor of an American church. He became a Professor and Dean at the faculté de theologie de Paris where I studied, arriving after my time there had ended. 

As a Dean, Raphael had quickly disentangled issues I had as I was trying to gather evidences of my credits. This allowed me to see my “Licence de theologie” validated as equivalent of a Master of Divinity, saving me from three additional years of seminary.  

I eventually met Raphael and his wife Cécile thanks to our common friend Olivier. Both of them worked with passion on the magazine Evangile & Liberté. We enjoyed several lunches and dinners together, meeting at the home of Olivier and Aurélie, the six of us abundantly talking about churches and seminaries, families, children and travels. Raphael and Cecile were fluent in English which helped Irvin to be part of the conversations.

A few weeks after our last encounter, Raphael found out that he had a brain tumor. Such a diagnosis could have created a total unraveling. Instead, he calmly started a treatment of daily chemo and radiotherapy while reading the drafts of his last book on Emerson “le sublime ordinaire” (daily or ordinary sublime). 

In a warm email, he thanked me for asking the prayer chains I belong to pray for him. One of his friends had slipped a prayer for him in the Western Wall in Jerusalem, he mentioned. Those initiatives meant a lot to him. But after those months of harsh treatments, another tumor was found and this time was not operable. From then on, news never ceased to be bad news. Until now.

I wished I could have gone to the memorial services and to the ceremonies at the Faculte de theologie. I thought a lot – I still do – about Cecile. We share the same first name, and years at the same high school although we did not know each other yet. Thanks to Olivier, I was able to read the testimony of his oldest son, who is 15, which ends that way:

“My father accepted his illness naturally as well as his upcoming death. And he did so for us, for the livings. He never expressed any concern about our future, the future of the four of us. He never gave us advice, because he trusted us, his “ordinary sublime”. He was convinced that life would resume if it had even ever stopped. He fully accepted suffering and death, to the point he led us in forgetting about it – and maybe forgetting it himself – in an ultimate and eternal gesture of life.”

What is a blessing? Irish poet John O’Donohue says it is “a circle of light drawn around a person… a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart. When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time.”

The life of Raphael, his books, his family and the memories he left behind are such blessings. The windows he left open for us have sowed and enriched our existence. 

Visiting Dad

River is a two year old black cocker spaniel. He lives at our friend’s Debbie from whom we got Tashina, our first beloved girl. We stayed in touch ever since. River is the Dad of our three month old puppy Denali.

We organized to visit after Easter and arrived early afternoon with our two girls. Debbie and her family live near Olympia – an hour south from us.

River is a young and enthusiastic boy. This scared Denali a bit – she withdrew and sat on my shoes. 

However Sitka (9 year old) appreciated River’s interest and was gracious to him.

Once the excitation fell down a bit, River showed some friendliness to Denali. She looks like him but her white spots that we like so much make her one of a kind.

A litter was recently born at Debbie’s. It did not go very well. Two of the four puppies did not survive the birth. The mother refused to  breast-feed the two others. She was so aggressive that Debbie took them away, concerned that she would kill them. Debbie started feeding them with a bottle (every two hours!). 

Then she had the idea to introduce them to another dog she had – a mother who had litters before and took good care of her puppies. Success was immediate. The new coming mom sniffed the puppies and started licking them. They soon became inseparable. “I asked the vet if she might have some milk, explained Debbie, and he said it was impossible. But I saw it : she does have some milk coming out!”

Debbie showed us the puppies through the window because they are not protected by vaccines yet. As we were taking picture, the surrogate mom was inside, looking at the pups and us. She was attentive and serene. 

A week in February

I made a resolution for 2015 and I want to keep it, in a flexible way. The resolution is to write a post in my blog at least once a week. It is so much harder to break months of silence. When it happens, I feel like I hardly let a few weeks go by, and realize suddenly that it has been 5 months of not blogging! Getting back to it is like running after a galloping horse and try to crawl back on its back.

So what happened this week?

An important event in the life of UPPC (University Place Presbyterian Church) where I work: the installation of our new Senior Pastor, Aaron Stewart, last Sunday. Aaron was picked for this position on the last Sunday of November – the same day I got ordained actually. This is an audacious and wise choice. Audacious because in the Presbyterian tradition, churches usually hire an outsider (it actually used to be the absolute rule) and Aaron has been part of the life of UPPC for the past 18 years. Wise because he is a great leader. He was the executive pastor during the transition that preceded his nomination. I appreciate his open and dynamic style. A new page of the life of UPPC just started.

And today is Friday the 13^th.

February the 13^th is Saint Beatrice day. My family never celebrated those days, in French “fêtes” – where you congratulate the bearer of the name of the Saint of the day.  But two have remained in my memories, February the 13^th and December 1^st, after the names of my Catholic friends! I was 8 when Beatrice and I met. We have often lived far away geographically from each other ever since but never stopped send each other letters, fax and emails, depending on the years.

Beatrice, in white, during one of our visits in Troyes, France, where she lives
with her husband Max who took the picture. 

February 13^th is also an anniversary. In 2001, Irvin and I got engaged on that day. Today afternoon, while enjoying some fresh oysters on a tavern by the water under a hesitant sky (clouds and sunshine) I was thinking that whatever people say, Fridays 13^th are actually propitious days. 

Children of the Promise

«He is not here» said the angel to the women on this very first Easter Sunday. Those words are the heart of our faith – and an invitation to adventure, said Raphaël Picon in his Easter predication. He concluded with those words:

“Christianity was born on this Easter Sunday. We were born on this Easter Sunday. We are the children of the promise. We are the children of a foolish promise… Nobody, nothing can condemn us anymore to failure or despair. Christ stated the infinite worth of each of us. His predication makes up the whole flavor of the Christianity we love and we are part of. This Christianity transforms us into adventurous pilgrims, walking alongside the poet to roll away every stones of the tombs, ripping away the fascination of death and make life possible again”.

Life is given back to us, beyond death. “He is not here” – those words resonate in my mind as I remember Hugues Madesclaire, who left us two years ago this week. His life did not end at the doorstep of his unsolved untimely death.  The memories he left, the influence he had on those who got to know him mysteriously keep on nurturing the world of the livings. His tomb is empty as well. We will find his presence in the light of the Risen one.

Halloween: moving the limits of the real world.

The limits of the real world are moving at the end of this month of October. Today, I saw Alice in the Wonderland and a skeleton shopping at the supermarket – not kids, adults. And on the parking lot on the way out, the car parked next to mine had a surprising feature: a human foot was sticking out of its trunk. At Halloween in the US, children are not the only ones getting a costume.

In a society where religion is so prevalent, that also means protests and arguments. This week for instance, a Baptist church by a the road had the following message on its board: «Abstain from all appearance of evil, 1 Thessalonians 5 :22. That includes Halloween».

The argument sometimes arises from surprising premises. A few years ago, one of the Puyallup schools decided to cancel the afternoon usually dedicated to the children enjoying their costumes… because of the protest of a group of Wiccans, “earth worshippers” who said they were shocked of the way witches were represented in those costumes. This situation and the indignation of the families brought the attention of national news[1].

Today, the day went harmoniously, and strangely, almost without rain. In the morning, Irvin preached a sermon titled “All Saints” where he talked about those people that inspire us and become examples of life to us. He mentioned Native persons of great faith from last century. Tomorrow is All Saints Day.

Tonight, we welcomed children with multicolor costumes with candies.
But the costume award should go to Guillaume, a fellow French friend, who lives in Tacoma. Guillaume and his family went above costuming. The four of them created a whole story made up with each of their costumes. Marcus, the youngest son was the dragon that put the fire to the house, which Guillaume was representing. The mom was taken out of bed because of the fire ; fortunately Max, the firefighter, arrived in time. The best way to “trickortreat” as a family, according to Max!

[1] To find out more, click on http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12381-2004Oct30.html