For the last ten months or so, I've been doing a retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Ignatius, who worked out the concepts and practices that eventually emerged as the Exercises over a lengthy period of convalesence from a disastrous battle injury, initially thought of them as the foundation for a thirty-day retreat. However, recognizing that there would be people interested in doing the Exercises who would be unable to absent themselves from their usual responsibilities for thirty consecutive days, he noted that it would also be possible to work though them on a daily basis, with periodic meetings with a spiritual director, over a much lengthier period of time. Hence, the "19th Annotation" retreat, so named because he mentions it in the 19th Annotation to the Exercises.

As my own retreat neared its conclusion last month, I became obsessed with early Jesuit history and so, at the same time that I was reading about Celtic Christianity in western Europe in preparation for the trip to Iona, I was also soaking up information about the Jesuits and their beginnings 1000 years later. And while I had initially planned a trip to Paris in large part for the purpose of getting to Chartres, the Jesuits found their way into my objectives, too.

Although he was born in the northern Basque area of Spain and obtained his early education there, Ignatius eventually made his way to the University of Paris, where he met the men who would become his earliest companions and the founding members of the Company of Jesus. (Fascinating to at least this Presbyterian is that Ignatius was a contemporary of the early Protestant reformers, and that he and John Calvin attended the University of Paris at the same time.)

My quest evenutally focused in on Montmartre and on the tiny church at the foot of Sacre'-Coeur known as the Chapel of the Martyrs. Sacre'-Couer is a famous landmark in Paris if for no reason other than its singular appearance on a hillside to the north of the city. Tourists who know nothing about it from a religious or historical standpoint still recognize it when they see it from the towers of Notre Dame or the top floor of the Centre Pompidou from its image on hundreds of postcards and guidebooks.

Almsot no one has heard of the Chapel of the Martyrs, and probably very few people stumble across it, located as it is on a side street slightly out of the way of the usual Montmartre walking routes. I was at something of a loss myself, until at the very last minute I stumbled across an article giving the address and indicating that it might be open on Friday afternoons.

"Okay," I announced, our first full day in Paris being also our only Friday there, "we are off on a quest for the first Jesuits," seven men who met in the Chapel of the Martyrs and made their first vows among themselves on August 15, 1534. The chapel itself was, like many of the sacred buildings in France, destroyed during the French Revolution and rebuilt during the next century.

We found it nestled on a busy side street, almost hidden behind scaffolding, but with a sign indicating that it would open at 3:00. Having arrived early in the afternoon, we went on up to wander around Sacre'-Coeur and Montmartre. Photography is not permitted inside basilicia, and it was barely light enough even to see the mosaics lining the side chapel walls, including one extensively illustrated by portions of the Jesuit story and another featuring St. Angela Merici (of interest to me since I went to an Ursuline school for a time). (Look for photos of Monmartre in another entry.)

As the afternoon waned, we found our way back down the hill to the Chapel of the Martyrs, nestled partway underground at the end of a short corridor. The chapel itself is maintained with the simplest of decors -- whitewashed walls, clear windows, a plain altar, and a large oil painting on the wall of the Jesuits making their vows at that spot. I won't try to convey what it meant to me to sit there quietly for an hour, to pray and absorb the powerful event that had taken place there but, after nearly a year in the company of Ignatius, it was one of the most moving experiences of my life. In another week I would be en route to Iona, frequently mentioned as one of the earth's thin places, where the seen and unseen worlds seem almost to meet, but I had already found a thin place under the bustle of Montmartre.

From January 16

I'm going to start my New Orleans series with the event for which we were there: the reopening of Tulane University. Readers of Midlife Matters know that my daughter, like most other freshmen, was there only a few hours last August before the Katrina evacuation, which was expected to last four days. In the four months that passed before they could return, Tulane students attended nearly 600 other colleges and universities, in many, if not most, cases with tution waivers that enabled badly needed dollars to stay at Tulane.

The campus itself, on higher ground than much of New Orleans, was badly damaged but not devastated. Four months later, much restoration works remains ahead, but the buildings are functioning and it is possible to imagine the beauty that must have marked the quadrangles of live oaks, magnolias, and green grass. Far more devastating has been the loss of several programs, cut in the wake of the Katrina-driven budgetary crisis. And worse than that, the loss of many faculty and staff homes, neighborhoods, and livelihoods.

Nevertheless, they came back -- over 85% of the freshmen who had had to begin their college careers elsewhere -- to a rousing convocation last Thursday. The auditorium was packed as a jazz band marched and danced down the center aisle, followed by the banners symbolizing each of the Tulane University colleges, the key members of the administration and, finally and to a spontaneous and rousing standing ovation, University President Scott Cowen. The last time that Dr. Cowen appeared on the convication stage, he was wearing Bermuda shorts and urging students and parents to hightail it out of town. This time, bedecked in his full academic regalia and wiping tears from his eyes, he presided over the rebirth of a university that he must have more than once suspected might never come to pass.

You can read the Tulane version of the event and see more photos here. From a personal standpoint, I will add that this was my first trip to New Orleans and I went, not because I thought my daughter needed two parents for her third attempt at beginning college, but because I wanted to be a witness to history. And I was never disappointed. Scott Cowen has made some hard, hard decisions in the past months, some of which have engendered further confusion, loss, and heartbreak for students, families, and faculty in departments that have been eliminated. But there is no question in my mind that Tulane University would no longer be in existence had it not been for his vision and determination, and the tireless effort he has made ever since he pulled his staff together by text-messaging when cell phones failed and paddled his canoe out of the building where he weathered the storm. It must have been quite a moment for him to stand on that podium and look at the freshmen families whose return he and his extraordinary administration, faculty, staff and grounds crews had engineered.

The rest of orientation was -- well, like and unlike freshmen orientations. Freshmen families were feted on a riverboat cruise on the Mississippi, a trip I had never expected to take, and at a party at the Audubon Zoo, one of the first NOLA instituitons to reopen after the hurricane. We got lost and frustrated on our attempts to pick up hangers, a surge protector, and toothpaste, and managed to miss all the information events scheduled for parents. The lovely daughter has had her challenges: she lost her wallet in a movie theatre the night before orientation, creating a series of headaches that will take months to repair, inasmuch as she is now 1000 miles from our own Bureau of Motor Vehicles; her roommate arrived with a hometown friend in tow, creating an unusual situation for a college orientation; and she is deeply missing her first semester friends and feeling a bit isolated in her sadness. Most of the freshmen went to hometown schools, had less than desirable experiences, and are thrilled without reservation to be back at Tulane, but she went to her second-choice college, one that she would have happily attended in the first place, had a wonderful semester there, and has very mixed feelings about this new transition. Thankfully she is a resilient, observant, and thoughtful young woman, willing to put herself on the line and fully capable of making her own decisions (woe to the person who tries to intervene!), so I am sure she will figure out the right path for herself.

We did make it onto a city tour bus, and I did make my own journeys south of and around a bit of New Orleans, so there is more to come in the next few days on history, architecture, and the everpresent and overwhelming wake of Katrina.

Let Me Know

I've been writing a series of entries -- elsewhere -- on my journey to New Orleans last week.  Would anyone be interested in my posting them over here?  It does seem that a number of folks just aren't making their own journeys to other blogging sites.

Countdown: One Week To Go

 
Freshman orientation at Tulane University begins one week from today. They are calling it "Orientation Deja Vu" since most of the freshmen were only there for a few hours the first time around. I posted the following on a college website tonight:

I called Housing today to try to find out my daughter's situation. They say she is assigned to the same room, her stuff should be there, they have no idea if the washers and dryers work, she will probably be assigned a roommate from the housing waiting list (which she expected, since her roommate never materialized and did not respond to phone calls post-Katrina), and she might be able to find out who it is if she calls them late tomorrow, and then she might be able to make contact through the Facebook. The woman I spoke to sounded completely frazzled and said they do not have access to the housing database and are working off an Excell spreadsheet.

The lovely daughter is cautiously optimistic. She says that she and her roommate last semester discussed how, after all the schools go through to match roommates, their assignment was completely random and could not have been more perfect. (Her roommate at her host school had also had a roommate who just didn't show up.)

No info about books ot anything else that might be different; we are hoping that her ID, room key, and PO Box are all still hers and functioning. Clearly we all have an adventure ahead of us.