When I go to pick my son up from catechism, I find him munching on a milk-chocolate Virgin Mary just outside the Eucharistic chapel.
– Where’d you get that?
He nudges his head toward Père.
– He’s got a whole box of them— for Advent.
– Do you have another one? I ask. I’m starving and could really go for a Holy Mom bar.
– I thought you were on a diet, Mom.
– Never say that word in church.
My son is now down to Our Lady’s skirt and pops it in his mouth.
– What’d you do in class today?
– You’ll have to look inside.
He points to his cartable, that rectangular box French kids stuff their books into and hook on their backs for school. I wonder if he’s being coy or if he’s just a bored catechist. I undo the plastic snaps and peek in.
– Is this what you mean?
I pull out a large orange greeting card with a collage inside. On the left hand panel are two Picture Bible images illustrating some parable, though it’s hard to tell which. A man in biblical wear is carrying a hot soup tureen to someone who looks hungry while kneeling behind a wall is a woman with carefully outlined, D-cup boobs. Could she be Mary Magdalene? On the right panel my son glued a copy of a medieval painting depicting Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. Lastly, a strip of thick white paper holds the card open diptych-style. On it the following hand-written phrase:
Seigneur, je veux t’aimer
Lord I want to love you
– Why did you write that?
– Because they told me to. We all had to write it.
My son’s assignment has me pondering on how Catholicism rears its head in France’s secular society and the degree to which its legacy permeates the French collective unconscious.
Let us look closely at the seemingly innocent Seigneur je veux t’aimer: The distance between I want to love you and I love you must be traveled by sacraments. The journey goes something like this: I want to love you Lord, but I can’t, at least not yet, not by myself. I have to do my first communion, then learn to go to confession and after that get confirmed, and then, maybe if I go to mass regularly and eat my breakfast afterward, and confess once a month…
The word want encapsulates the tenets of the Catholic faith which point to the well-worn steps of sacramental rituals the faithful must ascend to graduate from desire (want) to full on LUV. The Divine burns and the Children of God must be guided toward it with care lest they fry their little mitts.
If you are not Catholic and find this manner of thinking utterly foreign, you probably find certain aspects of life in France equally incomprehensible. The humanist victory of the 18th century severed ties with the Judeo-Christian tradition while paradoxically paving the way for new structures conveying some of its inherent values. The influences of Catholicism didn’t so much disappear as reemerge after the storms of the Revolution, disguised, appropriately, in rational attire. A good example of this, I believe, is the Education Nationale.
The Ecole Publique was established during the Third Republic, under the auspices of Jules Ferry whose intention was to create a free and obligatory school system that stood on firmly secular ground. The “burden” of education was lifted from the frocked and hoisted onto the shoulders of La République where it became the bedrock institution of Republicanism as we know it today.
In distinguishing itself as profoundly egalitarian, rational and anti-clerical, the French school system also took pains to distance itself from matters of the soul, that elusive but permanent fixture of religion, and what I will call the soul-energy that animates the creative endeavor. What we have today in France is a school system that has effectively ousted creativity from its curriculum in favor of a rigid and rigorous focus on science, math and the humanities. Of all the arts, literature rises to the place of honor; it is studied at an almost molecular level and revered in a quasi-religious way, which, as a novelist, I’m tempted to find appealing. There is no god in the Ecole Publique, but there is certainly Victor Hugo. What professeur would dare, as her American homolog might, ask students to pastiche a passage from Les Misérables to generate a new text? Quel Sacrilège ! The altar of the Literary Giant must be approached a-tremble.
While literature gets worshiped widely in school, music, drama and dance are studied outside its enceinte at the Conservatoire. Any child, if his parents are willing to wait in an interminable line the day enrollment opens, can receive high-level instruction for a pittance, a heartening example of the égalité principle put into practice. You will find equivalent courses in London or New York but be prepared to pay ten times the cost. The French should be lauded, or better yet, emulated on this front.
But having said this, I’d like to look at how this music instruction happens. To start off, the children are put into a general course where they are supposed to learn about the idea of music and hopefully get a sense of its hallowedness. By the end of the year they are allowed to peer — look but do not touch the fledgling catechists are told — at the instruments they will one day perhaps be permitted to play. In preparation for this moment of communion, they are submitted to one to two years of solfege study, their minds put to the rigorous work of understanding music’s mechanics.
This should sound familiar, no? Is this painstaking preparation not tantamount to saying that students must want to love the instrument before they can accede to loving it?
Violon, je veux t’aimer!
I do wonder if the French will one day root out these unconscious patterns or even if they should. Who’s to say? There is certainly no shortage of artists in France.