It has never left my mind that the great pleasures that my family and I are living through in Paris came to us through a terrible event: the death of my sister Ruthie. That is, if she hadn’t died, and I hadn’t written a book about her, we wouldn’t have had the resources to make this trip. Every day I thank her for this gift to our family. Of course we would a million times give this all back just to have her, but as she told me several times over the course of her cancer, she accepts it because she trusts that God will somehow bring good out of it. The best thing to happen to me here so far — the times I’ve spent alone with my oldest son, whose at times difficult relationship with his father worried Ruthie — was her gift.

Not only that, but Ruthie made sure her family traveled a lot when she was alive. They didn’t go to France, because that wasn’t their style, but they did travel together. Ruthie said she wanted to build memories for her girls. By the time her cancer was diagnosed, she was too sick to travel again, except for that final trip they took to Charleston before she died. But they had their memories, which wasn’t nothing. The point is, Ruthie’s exhortation to me to travel with my kids had a lot to do with us making the decision to invest the resources to come to France.

I say all that because I spent some time this morning before a surviving relic of Saint Genevieve, praying for M. and J., two friends who are severely ill, and for a couple of other friends who are facing a stark trial in caring for ill relatives. The shrine is in the church of St. Etienne du Mont, next to the Pantheon, atop the Mont Saint Genevieve. Saint Genevieve was a fifth-century mystic and wonderworker whose prayers are believed to have saved Paris from sacking by Attila’s Huns. She also cared for the sick and lived a life of saintly austerity. Her relics were revered in Paris, as was her memory (she is a saint of both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches) — until this:

The Place de Greve is some distance away from this Left Bank church. This wasn’t a spontaneous action; this was something that took satanically sustained spite. Some relics of the saint that weren’t in the church were found elsewhere, and later returned to the church, where they now exist in the shrine chapel I visited this morning, to pray and light a candle for my sick and suffering friends.

Incidentally, this icon from the shrine is of St. Simon Stylites and St. Genevieve, and was donated by Orthodox Christians. St. Simon was a contemporary of St. Genevieve, and sent her a letter telling her he had heard of her holiness, and asking her prayers (sorry for the blurriness; the light was low, and I couldn’t get any closer):

I was startled to come across the tomb of Blaise Pascal in a side chapel, and prayed there too. Plus, there was this plaque in the St-Genevieve chapel:

Fr. Francois Basset: priest, anti-Nazi resister, deportee to Mauthausen, where he died. He is remembered there among the relics of his city’s great patron, where, I trust, he is praying for all of us who live out our blessings amid suffering, which is to say, all of us, without qualification.