French and understated

I think there's something really quite beautiful about the way the French go about being catholic. The overwhelming majority goes to church only for big celebrations: baptisms, weddings, funerals, in a word: when they can't avoid it.

That doesn't mean anything: we're just a fiercely secular society, and that is so attractive! Quite a lot of my French friends have got a rough childish faith from their first communion days: faith is what they did when they were kids, they have some memories of cathechesis classes when they were eight and flamed up. Oddly enough, their relation to the divine stayed like that, childish and dependent, untouched by years of self-righteous efforts at being holier than the next person. We're almost fighting to be the least zealous of the lot: we loathe religious zeal with a passion.

But we'll still let our kids be raised in this tradition, we'll still entrust our babies and our dead to the care of God. We'll pretend that we don't care, we'll say loudly that it's a nice occasion to have a party, to be together, we'll be all mundane about it, and conceal our true position so as not to impose on the reality of others.

We'll sneak into the cathedral to pray on a tuesday, feeling slightly stupid because we don't know how. The whole nation all buy the same books like Christan Bobin's stunning "The Most Low". (The bloody English version's cover is cheesy as hell: just another religious lit book; the French version is packaged to appeal to literary types of all persuasions, and indeed it does, and goes on to win the most prestigious secular literary prizes).

If you know us very well and you get us very drunk, we might owe up to the ways in which we know God. And then the next day we'll feel exposed, vulnerable and loved. Then we will forever live knowing that our beloved Frenchmen have got as much faith (or Zaccheus-like agnosticism) as anyone, they're just not inclined to talk about more than twice a decade with their closest friends. And how I cherish those moments, in which the divine just bursts out, vulnerable and beautiful. I'm a fan of tiny allusions, tiny little socially unacceptable sentences in which we bare our souls for an instant, before stepping back into ordinary French life. A couple of words which really mean: do you know too?

Sometimes, when I've had enough of North American in-your-faceness, I long to drink a beer with my french friends next to a peaceful lake, any old lake. And if there is no allusion to God, all the better! I'm still feeding on one splendid instant from two years ago.