Spiritual Memoir Takes Us on a Journey Through Paris, Burgundy and the Soul

Talking of Michelangelo: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell in the Burgundy Region by Peter A. Giersch

Peter A. Giersch sets out for France expecting time to contemplate, surrounded by monastic quiet. What he finds instead is something closer to a spiritual ambush.

In Talking of Michelangelo: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell in the Burgundy Region, Giersch turns a two-week trip into a memoir that’s part travelogue, part journey of the soul. It begins with a request: for his 40th birthday, Giersch doesn’t want another gadget or a big party. He asks his wife, Carole, for a weeklong Ignatian retreat at a monastery in France.

Before he reaches the monastery, however, he spends time in Paris. Here we see Giersch in his natural element: walking, remembering, noticing, making connections. He’s always looking at one thing and seeing another behind it. Visits to landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and the Louvre become meditations on the passage of time, mortality, beauty, hubris and political power. Even the everyday details of travel and the city become charged with meaning. A French film on the plane leads him to the prodigal son and the arc of rise, fall and redemption. A couple saying goodbye at a train station becomes a passage on presence and separation, heaven and hell.

This dual contemplation of the external and the internal, the physical and the spiritual, becomes the book’s governing tension. The visible world keeps pressing Giersch toward the invisible one.

A Retreat Becomes a Reckoning

The charming, wandering quality of the Paris chapters gives way to something starker when he reaches Flavigny, the ancient village in Burgundy where the retreat takes place. At the monastery, the Ignatian Exercises do not offer Giersch a soothing spiritual tune-up. They force him to contemplate the Four Last Things — death, judgment, heaven and hell — with an intensity he did not anticipate. A thought takes hold: What if he has a mortal sin on his soul?

From there, the book becomes a record of evasion, fear, argument and eventual surrender. He tries to reason his way around the problem. He tries to distract himself. At one point, he considers whether it would be easier simply to give up Christianity. Not because unbelief has won, exactly, but because belief has become too inconvenient to ignore — a faith that demands something of him that he isn’t ready for.

This is where the memoir is at its most compelling. Giersch is writing as a man who wants holiness and comfort, God and Paris, confession and port wine, eternal life and a good cigar. He examines this contradiction, however, with a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor. A memoir about mortal sin and hell can sound like a hard sell. Giersch makes it surprisingly companionable.

A Restless, Funny, Deeply Catholic Voice

Another source of warmth is Giersch’s frequent digressions. It’s like having a long dinner conversation with a learned, funny, restless friend who keeps remembering one more story he has to tell before returning to the point. He pauses for etymology, family stories, theological explanation and the occasional cultural complaint. He writes like a man whose mind is crowded in the best possible way.

Giersch can write about hell, mortal sin and the fear of God without losing his comic timing. He can make a theological argument, then undercut himself with an anecdote about jet lag or the absurdity of being a modern American trying to become holy. The result is a voice that feels unusually personal.

It’s worth noting that this is not a neutral spiritual memoir in which every belief system is kept at a polite distance. Giersch writes from inside Catholicism, with all its sacraments, saints, relics, commandments and claims about eternity. But even readers who do not share his framework may recognize the deeper human movement: the way we avoid the truths that would change us, and the way grace sometimes arrives as interruption rather than comfort.

By the end, the monastery, Paris and the author’s own comic restlessness have all become part of the same reckoning. Giersch has written a book about travel, but the real journey is toward the thing he would rather not face and cannot finally escape. Talking of Michelangelo is a searching, beautifully human memoir about what happens when the questions we politely avoid finally insist on being answered.