By Andrea Scarpino
Paris’ Notre Dame is my favorite place in the world. I have studiously walked the church’s circumference outside and in, crossed the Seine dozens of times trying to take in the enormity of its stone walls. I have cried in the monument for those deported by France in WWII, eaten pain au chocolat sitting on a bench outside the front doors so early in the morning visitors weren’t yet allowed to enter. I have sat in a pew on Christmas Day, listened to the priests singing hymns in Latin and French, smelled the evergreen tied to each pew, the hundreds of lit candles, incense.
I love to feel small and unimportant in Notre Dame’s beauty, to stare in wonderment at its stain glass windows, wooden doors, to listen to my own footsteps, my own breath, as I walk its floors. I love to think about the hundreds of years it took to construct, the generations of workers and Parisian citizens who never saw the finished product—and revel in my luck, my privilege. In Notre Dame, I come the closest that I’ve ever come to feeling something divine, something magical. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s the closest I come to believing in something spiritual.
Usually, I have to try really hard to look contemplative when someone begins discussing religion or spirituality. I don’t know what spirituality means, in all honesty, and every time I’ve pressed people for answers, I’ve felt only dissatisfaction with their replies. In the US, I can rarely be bothered to peek inside church walls, even when traveling. There’s something so piddly about most American churches, something so beige and small and, well, human.
And that may be the heart of it, I’m beginning to realize. American churches wear their humanness on their sleeves—what with their all-purpose rooms and industrial carpeting, expansive parking lots, grape juice glasses, neon signs, AA meeting announcements. They feel like any other building on the block, their windows and walls of a scale I recognize. I don’t feel anything magical within.
I’ve been to American synagogues and felt that same humanness, and the Moroccan mosque I visited was impressive but so modern (the floors heated from underneath, the roof able to be opened and closed electronically) that it was hard for me to see it as magical. The closest I’ve felt to the magic of Notre Dame was visiting Buddhist temples in South Korean, and standing among redwood trees in Northern California. There, again, that quietness, that feeling of something special inhabiting a place, something magical I can’t quite understand. Among the redwoods, especially, I felt almost a beating heart, almost a breathing.
When I’m asked about my religious inclinations, I always stumble around for an answer. Saying I’m atheist or agnostic misses the point entirely—it’s not that I do or don’t believe in a god; I just don’t think about him. I don’t pray to a higher being, but I do talk to my father and hope he hears me, I send out wishes to the universe, thank planes for landing safely, thank the ocean for a beautiful day at the beach. And in Notre Dame, I feel something. Something magical, unable to be named. Something that makes me weep. So I guess that would be my religion, my spiritual pursuit—moments of magic. Moment when I feel the universe somehow beating inside me. When I feel small, in wonderment. When I feel the greatness of our lumbering earth.
Poet and essayist Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB.
Planet of the Blind 
I realized one day not too long ago that, for one occasion or another, I’ve visited many of the places of worship in the greater L.A. area. I wish now that I’d posted a map at the beginning and stuck pins, with event names, at each place I’ve visited. I drive by places now, and they just trigger a vague feeling that I’ve been inside. Religious community rooms with chipped linoleum floors below, water-stained acoustical ceiling tiles above, and large, aluminum coffee urns with heaps of sub sandwiches arranged atop paper tablecloths on fold-up tables do all start to look alike, but are so gosh darn comfortable that they inspire a certain reverence nonetheless.
I don’t attend church; I tell people my Sunday morning religion activities involve jammies, waffles and sleeping late, but, yes, churches can be strange and wonderful places as long as I don’t have to sit through excessively chatty sermons on any regular basis. The cozy Anglican ones, St. Mary’s in Los Feliz and Church of the Angeles in West Pasadena, with their impossibly hard wooden pews, have great sound for chamber music concerts. I still remember many years ago the longtime Braille Institute volunteer who had arranged to have a mezzo soprano singing Battle Hymn of the Republic from high in the choir loft of St Basil’s Catholic Church as the congregation filed out after his funeral service. Good stuff.
In L.A., we have Forest Lawn, in a class by itself: Cemetary as your friendly local park. Couple of weeks ago, after a construction project detoured me up into the wilds of Griffith Park, I arrived way too late at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills for graveside services for Dick Smith, a guy who’d already been at Braille Institute forever when I started working there in 1981, teaching and playing piano until the place and the sound of his piano playing have become one in the same for me — the closest I’ll ever get to understanding eternal life. Cool thing was that Dick always looked exactly the same, as if time stood still for 30 years, except for the nifty lady named Audrey who married him about 10 years back, and from that time on it was Dick and Audrey hand-in-hand. I paid my respects to Audrey, and sat down next to Dick’s Iranian Access Services driver and his wife, and thought, as I listened to him talk about Dick, how incredible that a public transportation program could forge a friendship between two guys born worlds apart. The grave was still empty, but the services had definitely concluded — we couldn’t figure it out, but assumed some sort of logistical scheduling problems. If we’d stayed much longer, I suppose someone would have gently moved us along so the plastic canopy could be disassembled. Gives me goosebumps.
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