Le Jardin d’Eugène Delacroix Perfectly trimmed hedges. Lush ivy springing from stone and dirt. Square plots from which violet, poppy-red, soft blue, and yellow pop. For just a moment, the clouds part and the sun illuminates all the green. I write in my leather journal, wondering what art was made in this space, and pondering the nature of this city, this espace de rencontre. La Tour Eiffel She glitters. After sunset, on the hour, for ten minutes, she lights up, and it takes my Américaine breath away. She may be cliché, but her majestic curves and intricate lines will never fail to make me smile. I take photos of her from every angle in the city, from Balzac’s house to the Sacré Coeur. Sometimes, I joke that she’s my “girlfriend,” given my lack of any romantic connections in the city. Une Boulangerie au Quartier Vavin I once wrote in my journal that French food is the cure for a broken heart. Nothing in the US compares to it; it has something to do with our flour. As light, yellow quiche, like custard, softly slides in my mouth, I let worries about classes leave me for a moment. I savor salty bits of ham, and a crunch of pâte brisée. For dessert, golden almond cake with glistening apples on top. I crack the surface with my spoon, delighting in the succulent sweetness. Une croix à l’Eglise de la Madeleine, après le Pâques Laid on the grey steps right before the entrance, a flowerbed cross, covered in red fabric, filled with roses and greenery, with white flowers at its center. I take a photo, from the front and the back, where it frames the busy street. I’d almost forgotten Easter was that past Sunday. It’s nice to see the reminder of resurrection. La Seine et le Pont d’Alexandre III I amble along the path that runs the Seine. It’s cloudy, but the gray waters are more serene and breathtaking than bluest ocean, framed perfectly by bridges strewn along it. The Alexandre III bridge, my favorite— light blue with gold trimmings, a woman in bronze sculpted into its center, golden statues standing atop two towers on each side that somehow gleam without any sunlight hitting them. Past the bridge, I see the Eiffel Tower, so of course, I take a photo. I smile, and know I’m going to miss this— the views, the wandering, the constant awe. I take dozens of photos as I walk through this city, trying to compensate for the story and the wonder the photos couldn’t possibly tell.
That story of my three and a half months abroad in Paris in 2018, for me, includes multiple layers. I was grappling with my crippling perfectionism that led me to have multiple panic attacks a week1, and to take my fears head-on I went to a therapist for the first time in my life. I had just come out to myself as queer a month and a half before landing in France, so I was navigating that identity anew after repressing it for so long. I was exploring what my faith meant to me and how I wanted to engage in Christian community, and in attending a French-speaking evangelical church for the entirety of my time there, I realized when the plane hit the ground back on US soil that I was no longer an evangelical anymore. It hit me in the gut, suddenly, how much Paris had changed me, and how strange it felt to be back in my hometown. [You might notice my “commentary” that follows is pretty long; that’s partly why the post is late, but it didn’t take *too* long because most of this is an excerpt from my work-in-progress-memoir.]
In the garden of Eugene Delacroix, which is part of his former home-turned-museum featuring his work (some of which was quite racist depictions of folks from the Middle East), I journaled after taking some photos with my instant camera. I wrote in French; since I had been in Paris, all my journal entries had been in French. My writing reflected the journey I had taken so far in Paris, and the sort of “mythology” I had created around it.
Paris was an espace de rencontre, a space of encounter. I didn’t come up with the phrase myself. Despite how much I hate André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja (which I had to read for my literature course), that was where the idea came from, or at least it came from my professor’s explanation of the book’s themes. It was perhaps the one idea from that book that I was able to understand, that Paris was a place of encounters with all kinds of people, and these encounters were transformative. I resonated with this. I thought about all the people I had met through Eglise Connexion, the evangelical church I attended, and how I had met other people through them. Just a few days before, I had gone to a Scottish pub in the Marais neighborhood with a few of them, including Ben2, a fellow American student with whom I had become close, and all of them brought along a few of their friends. At the pub, we had to stand for an hour before we got a table, but eventually we sat in the billiard room in the back. We played card games, told funny stories, and laughed a lot. I felt free. Although I wasn’t out to any of them, I would say I even felt like my authentic self (but maybe that was just because I also had my first non-virgin pina colada that night, on a relatively empty stomach). Although most of the people at the table were Christians, I didn’t feel like I had to put up a sort of front.
Thinking about this night at the pub caused me to reflect on my friendship with Ben, whom I describe in my journal as someone “who shows me the providence of God,” a very weighty task to attach to someone. I think that shows how close we had grown to each other in just a month and a half, and how I thought of him as a great blessing in my life. Although I was busy with weekend travels and schoolwork during February, we still texted each other a lot. In March, we talked each week at church and on the metro ride home, and that meetup at the pub was the third time I had gone on an outing with him that month. Some of our conversations were about what we were learning in our classes, or about French culture, or our college experiences in America, but most of them were about the Christian life.
Once, on the metro, Ben asked me what I thought the role of the Holy Spirit was in the lives of believers in the modern-day. This was a hot-button question in the evangelical community; there were evangelicals who believed that spiritual gifts (like speaking in tongues) were only for the first-century church, that the Holy Spirit worked in the modern day by helping us to read Scripture, make wise decisions, and convict us of our sins. Then there were evangelicals with a Pentecostal or charismatic bent who were speaking in tongues, prophesying, and healing people (I understand that these things are sometimes fabricated or untrue, but I’m enough of a mystic not to dismiss them entirely). My “non-denominational” church fell somewhere in between these camps, believing in the gifts of the Holy Spirit but not putting much focus on them in discussions of theology and Christian life, focusing instead on the Holy Spirit’s guidance and conviction. I was always doubtful about stories of healing, particularly if the healer was making any money from the ministry, but I thought speaking in tongues was really cool; I had never been able to do it, but I respected people who could.
I told Ben that in my life, the Spirit mostly guided me when I made decisions, made my heart beat really fast and my head pound when there was something I needed to do. Sometimes it felt like my skin was about to jump off of me, a sensation so urgent that I could not ignore it. When this happened, I would also “hear” the Spirit’s call; not an audible voice, but a pressing thought that became a deep sense of knowing3. I became unable to think about anything else. The Holy Spirit had also given me peace in hard times. Sometimes, when I prayed, I felt this sense of calm in my chest, even when that calm didn’t really make sense. This didn’t always happen, but when it did, I was grateful. I told Ben that I believed in miracles, told him the story of my baptism, as well as other moments where God had healed my heart. I told him about the depression I went through during my first year of college, how the election made me question my faith, but how I had gotten through it and sorted through my questions, being led by the Spirit, and ended up growing in my faith. I had only talked about the election with one other Christian-who-goes-to-the-same-church-as-me before this, an older woman who volunteered in the high school youth group who I saw as a faith mentor. Ben had gained my trust enough for me to open up to him about it; I was no longer just talking about controversial topics to “test” him, as I had done before. I really wanted to share my story and my beliefs with him, bit by bit, as I became more comfortable.
As Ben and I left the Scottish pub together with a couple of his friends, I opened up to him even more about my politics, telling him about the protest I was attending the next day, March for Our Lives (the Paris chapter protest was held at Trocadéro Square, right across from the Eiffel Tower). The protest was against gun violence, particularly mass shootings in schools in the United States; it was a movement started by students who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. I was absolutely disgusted by the number of mass shootings that were happening every day across the country, and I wanted to go to the protest to voice my support for gun control legislation. I had always been so confused, even when I was evangelical, about Christians’ vocal support for gun rights. Sure, a lot of Christians liked to hunt animals, but you didn’t need an AK-47 to go hunting.
Ben and his friends seemed interested in going to the protest, but they told me the study abroad program all of them were in would never allow them to attend; their program director had strictly told them not to participate in protests. The director probably meant protests or strikes without a permit, and March for Our Lives had a permit, but I didn’t bring any of this up. Still, Ben wasn’t bothered by my support of gun control, and I again felt relief fill my chest. It’s not like I needed his approval for what I believed. If he had disagreed, I would have stayed firm in my stance. It’s more like I needed hope in my generation of evangelicals, that I wasn’t the only one questioning things and changing my mind to have more progressive beliefs. On Twitter, I had started to encounter many people who had left the evangelical faith, but most of them were at least five years older than me (millennials). I wanted to know what was happening among my peers.
That night, on the metro ride home, in talking about that protest, I was able to be even more myself than I had been before. And this made me start to wonder, as I sat in Delacroix’s garden, whether I should come out to Ben, whether I trusted him enough. I wrote in my journal, “Can I? What would he think? How would he react?” The thought made me really nervous, but I also longed to see what would happen if I allowed myself to be my complete self to another Christian. I believe this question was the leading of the Spirit; my heart was pounding in the silence of the garden.
Would Ben be the first Christian I came out to? I had other options. I had my university’s chaplain, I had progressive Christian friends; I had even met a fellow young progressive Christian at March for Our Lives. I happened to strike up conversation with a woman holding a sign that said “Books not Bullets,” and she gave me another sign to hold, one that said “Enough is Enough.” We stood together holding the signs, and as we spoke, I quickly learned that she, Katherine, was there because she had learned about the march through the church she went to, the American Cathedral in Paris (an Episcopal church). One of the priests at the Cathedral was a speaker in the march program. I smiled at the woman, and told her I was a Christian. She warned me that she was a very liberal Christian. I laughed and told her that I was, too. We hung out for most of the march (which, in Paris, was actually a rally, but it kept the name of the march happening in Washington, DC), and I almost considered telling her I was queer, but couldn’t find a relevant time to bring it up (and I was also still nervous to say it aloud). One thing I wasn’t afraid to do, though, was curse in public for the first time. One of the chants at the rally was “We call bullshit,” and I didn’t even skip a beat before joining in, Katherine and my friends in the study abroad program raising our fists. France changed the way I thought about language, and particularly cuss words. We made these words; God didn’t create prohibited words. Sometimes, the only valid response to such injustice, and inaction in the face of injustice, is to call it out as profane, as bullshit. Sometimes fuck is a holy word in the midst of grief and anger. It’s not the word that should be offensive, but the fact that school shootings and mass shootings keep happening and nothing is being done to prevent them.
At the end of the rally, I got Katherine’s contact information and hoped we would be able to hang out again (I realize in hindsight that I was crushin’ on her), but she ended up being very busy with her au pair job for the rest of the time I was in Paris. Still, I believe that she and I met for a reason. I needed to know that there were communities of faith and people of faith, my age, that stood alongside me as I protested injustice. I also believed, and wrote in my journal, “Dans cette ville, ces rues, je découvre Dieu comme si c’était pour la première fois, dans les yeux de mes connaissances.” In Paris, it was like I was discovering God for the first time, through my friendships and acquaintances, my encounters with others. I was learning a new way of being in community as a Christian…I was learning a new way of being a Christian, and not just focusing on my changing ideology.
The final night I was in Paris, I went to Eglise Connexion’s night of worship. I loved singing in French and hearing our voices rise together in the small space to just a piano accompaniment, much less showmanship than the Nights of Worship at my home church. Afterwards, Ben and I, along with a few others, took a stroll along the canal near Place de la République. Then, at around midnight, Ben and I left to go back to our homestays, but I asked if we could go to one last place before that. We went to the Alexandre III bridge. It was my favorite place to look at the Eiffel Tower, where it was perfectly framed by the Seine river. The tower shone brightly against the dark sky, and in the other direction, there was a Ferris wheel lit up with the colors of the French flag, blue, white, and red.
I hadn’t come out to Ben yet, and wouldn’t come out to him in person, but in a letter I wrote to him, my final assignment for my French Literature course. The assignment was to write a creative work (in French) about Paris based on our own experiences, and use one of the texts we had read in the course as a model. It was easy for me to decide which text because there was only one in that course that I liked, the very last one that we read: Lettres parisiennes by Nancy Huston and Leïla Sebbar. It was two non-French women writing letters to one another while in Paris, on the topics of identity and feeling exiled from their home countries. When I read the excerpt of the book that the professor assigned us, I thought about Ben. In a way, so many of my conversations with him were about our identity as Christians in the 21st Century, what it meant to follow Jesus here and now. And the concept of exile also resonated with me, especially because the exile of these women was self-imposed. In leaving the US for Paris, I obviously felt exiled from the church I grew up in. I was in-between identities, coming into new ones (like acknowledging my queerness) and wrestling with old ones. I was in-between worlds, in-between countries and in-between the ways evangelicalism was expressed in them. I truly loved Eglise Connexion. Although the pastors there believed in “biblical” gender roles, other beliefs they expressed, like helping the poor in tangible ways, were more progressive than their US counterparts. I also knew that some people at the church agreed with me about gun control; when I made a post on Facebook about the March for Our Lives Rally, many people from Eglise Connexion liked it.
Still, I knew that Eglise Connexion was not my permanent church home, not just because I was only in Paris for a few months but also because I knew if I came out, the likelihood of acceptance was low. I was still unsure of what my church home would be when I got back to the US, too—even after all my experiences in Paris, I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to the Young Adults group at my home church or not, and I didn’t know if the United Methodist Church was my home yet, either. I was enjoying my “exile” from the US; Paris gave me the space to postpone the inevitable moment in which I would never go back to the church I grew up in, in which I would have to find new community. In Paris, I was able to hold myself in this in-between space, hold on to the hope that maybe I could have a foot in both progressivism and evangelicalism, and that is why it was so hard to leave.
After taking a few photos on the bridge with my instant camera (which didn’t turn out well, they were completely black), we walked back to the metro, and I told him about the assignment for my literature course. He seemed off-put and flattered at the same time, and asked awkwardly if he would get to read it. I told him I wanted to translate it to English, revise it and expand upon some things before I sent it.
When I came back to the US, expand upon it I did. The letter doubled in size. In it, not only did I talk about Eglise Connexion and my friendship with Ben, but I also laid out a summary of my whole faith journey up to that point, how I’d become disillusioned with evangelicalism, had lost trust in the church and in Christians in general, and how I approached relationships with church folk as if I was walking on a field of broken glass. Even before coming out to anyone, I’d felt like most friendships with people from the Young Adults group had dwindled. We would have small talk, and that was it, because I hadn’t trusted them enough to talk about deeper things.
I also told Ben that even though it hurt me to learn that he believed that being gay was a sin, I still wanted to be friends with him, because he was my brother in Christ. I wrote that our friendship was not based in agreement or uniformity, but in Jesus. I did encourage him to do research, listing the name of one affirming theologian, but stood firm in the belief that it was not my job to educate him about pro-LGBTQ+ theology. I didn’t explain how I came to terms with my queer identity, but it is clear how my queer identity affected my relationship with the Christian church, bringing along so many uncertainties and trust issues, which culminated in my friendship with Ben and in that letter. Because of the Spirit’s leading and all the moments Ben and I had shared together, I was able to be vulnerable. I was able to stare my fear of rejection in the face. After finishing my revisions, I sent the letter to Ben as an attachment via Facebook message.
Two days after I sent it, his response was that he loved the letter, and that he would send me his response soon. He never did. We actually stopped texting as much as we used to; part of this was inevitable, since he was still in France for a few months doing an internship, so he was really busy. But even after he came back to the US, I always felt that there was this awkward distance between us (especially given that he never again spoke about the letter). I had really hoped my letter would get him thinking about his beliefs, and maybe it did, but I don't know.
Still, I did not write that letter in vain. Ben was the first Christian I came out to, after all. It was a big step that showed I was growing in confidence and courage. I would not allow my fear of rejection to keep me from showing my true self, and I would not allow for myself to sit in-between anymore. I knew, in writing that letter, that I could no longer identify as an evangelical. Like a lot of people in the exvangelical community, I did not know where I was going. I did not know if I would completely cut ties with the Young Adults group at the church I grew up in or not. But I could say that I no longer felt true belonging in the community I’d come from.
What fish-out-of-water moments (could be travel or other things) have been transformational for you? If you’ve left the only world you knew, what did you learn from it? And if you’ve ever felt like you’re in an in-between space of transformation, I’d love to hear if you resonate with how I’m describing it.
I think that my realization that I’m autistic has also had me totally rethink my experiences in Paris, particularly in this area. Of course I was overwhelmed when I realized I didn’t know how to get back to my homestay on my first day, of course I sobbed over the fact that I left my umbrella in a bathroom in Luxembourg Gardens and someone else took it and I was overwhelmed at the prospect of going to the store to buy a new one. It was really the first time I had so much independence, even with a host family providing breakfast every day and dinner on weeknights. I had no idea what to do with that independence, so afraid that I couldn’t “adult,” balance my schoolwork with my desire to explore the city, and also get perfect grades.
Not his real name.
I’m reading Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology by Esther Lightcap Meek for my Critical Reading Lab, and although some of it is very high-level philosophical and difficult to understand, some of what she says about how we come to know through mutual relationship with “the real” instead of just receiving information impersonally reminds me of my experiences in Paris particularly, of being so grounded in my environment and relationships with others and the guidance of my program director and therapist that I actually came to know things I never would have otherwise.