Reflections on the Senior Trip to France by Ben Dunlap
“Wherever they go, they spread joy” – these gracious words about our boys came from Mr. Patrick Egger, in an underground Paris metro station on the final evening of our voyage. Patrick’s words were particularly gracious: While he and I were struggling with the complicated ticket kiosk, hoping we could buy 19 tickets before the last train left Paris, the boys had set up a human arch a few feet away from us and were loudly inviting passing commuters to run through their arch, and then cheering even more loudly when anyone took them up on it – which happened often. Excellent conditions for trying the patience of a chaperone!
But the locals were delighted – and as I reflected on Patrick’s words during the train ride back to our vans (a train ride punctuated by singing and dancing that put smiles on the faces of many ennui-burdened passengers), I realized that he had summed up our whole experience in France. “Wherever they go, they spread joy”.
And I believe France can use a little joy these days. There are certainly many signs of hope: the standing-room-only traditional Mass we attended at Saint-Georges in Lyon; the record numbers of young adults requesting baptism in recent years; and the ongoing silent, hidden self-oblation of the many contemplative religious in France: the Benedictines of Fontgombault, the Carthusians of the Grand Chartreuse, the Carmelites of Lisieux – just to name the ones we visited.
But in some ways, the eldest daughter of the Church seems a bit weary. We heard more than once that only two percent of her 60 million children attend Sunday Mass regularly. Most of the village churches we saw share a priest with dozens of other churches, so Mass is only celebrated in a given village once every few months. And the priests who care singlehandedly for dozens of villages are often not even of French origin, but–in an oddly beautiful twist of Providence–missionaries from Africa.
So it was very beautiful, and a little surprising, to hear people at other tables join in when the boys sang the Hail Mary in French at restaurants in Chartres and Lyon – or to learn that the nationally-recognized charcutier we met at a village farmers’ market in the Beaujolais is also a third-order Franciscan. Chef François was over the moon to meet a large group of Americans and hear them sing in the village square, and it didn’t take him long to guess that we were a religious group and tell us about his “other job”.
Moments like this occurred on almost every day of the trip: some of them sublime, such as chanted Compline in the ancient abbey church of La Lucerne, and some of them silly–for example, when one van-load of boys (name of chaperone withheld) strapped balloon puppets to their heads for a grocery run. And then there were the moments in between, as when the boys closed their busking in Tours by jogging back to the vans in human-train formation and singing “On the One Road”, while some locals cheered from their medieval apartment windows, and others attached themselves to the human train and jogged along with us!
But all of these moments had the same thing in common: joy. It seems that our little group of jongleurs de Dieu had so much of it that they couldn’t help sharing it with everyone they came into contact with – road-weary chaperones included.