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It’s true: the church is the same everywhere. In particular, the wifi password. No translation is used for the wifi in France, at least. This allowed me to “commune with my father” via WhatsApp while seeking a more spiritual version of that phrase on temple grounds. Another interesting thing I learned that morning is that the Paris temple doesn’t have a Moroni because the building is not allowed to be higher than the King’s Bed in neighboring Versailles. This makes it a bit tricky to find the temple while walking there by memory, but the building is still clearly a place of worship – the peace is unmistakable. Even in the midst of all my questions and new understandings, the temple is a place of refuge and peace to me. I am grateful that I received guidance from the Lord to go through the temple and get my endowments a couple of years ago. It has given me something to hang onto during my wanderings now. Even when I don’t really want to go to church on Sunday, I do want to go to the temple. And that, in turn, keeps me attending just enough that I will be able to renew my recommend when the time comes.
I sat in several churches while in France, including the cathedral attached to the Papal Palace in Avignon. If you aren’t very familiar with religious history, this was the second seat of power during the great schism when there were two competing popes. I sat in there early one morning when a thunderstorm made my normal morning haunt of the neighboring garden a bit unsafe and unpleasant. It was a Thursday. It was about 7:30. And in a small side wing, a priest was leading a prayer service. I didn’t intrude, but I watched the faithful as they left. They came in early on a weekday, before work and fighting traffic, to be with God. After they left, the main lights were turned on, and a nun came and walked the chapel. She stopped at each alcove and offered a quiet prayer to the saints depicted in each. I felt blessed to sit in this holy place as well.
I also visited many cemeteries. This is where my thought that I would like to help catalog cemeteries came from, in fact. The burial places of Europe are so crowded and winding, the maps that indicate the famous resting places aren’t always clear. Trying to find a less-illustrious name could be nightmarish. And while I live somewhere with relatively new cemeteries, that simply means now is the time to start logging them well so future generations can navigate them better.
I also thought about how often service in church (not just ours) has an end-goal of conversion. I feel like many times people say “be a good person to help people come to Christ” or “give them service and they will admire us and come to be one of us.” Can’t we serve just to serve? I was welcomed into a family where I couldn’t speak the language of almost any of them, given free lodging and food, shown around a beautiful corner of the world, and made friends with people who live a life completely different than mine. And they are devoutly Catholic – the littlest grandbaby’s baptism was this week. But there was no sense of that being a factor. They were welcoming me because I had become friends with one of them, briefly, 4 years ago, halfway around the world. It was pure generosity, without guile. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen in the church. I’m just saying I wish it were the predominant approach. Instead of serve to convert, I would rather say “love this person because they live on this earth with us and have the right to experience life to the fullest and see the best things they can in the best way they can during the time they have and you have the opportunity to help.”
Thanks for the update. I have said openly and unapologetically in church, everywhere I have lived, that one of our biggest failings is serving those outside “our own” with an agenda rather than simply out of a sense of love. It is a message I preach regularly, in as many different ways as possible.
Beautiful! Thank you for sharing these thoughts! We are a small and very missionary minded church. We have scriptures that reference how a life spent converting just one new person is a life well spent. We have talks that label every member a missionary and suggest that our non-member friends and neighbors will blame us in the hereafter if we do not do our best in trying to share our faith with them in this life. It is part of our culture.
Love this on so many levels. Thanks.
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