Harriet Beecher Stowe in Paris, 1853. Me in Barcelona, now.

“At last I have come into a dreamland,” she wrote. “I am released from care. I am unknown, unknowing.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe was in her early forties that summer, the most famous author in America. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Everywhere she went in England and Scotland, crowds pressed in. Then she reached Paris, and nobody knew her face. She called herself a little bit of a woman, thin and dry as a pinch of snuff. She walked the city for three weeks, unnoticed, and loved it at once.

I read those words last week on my terrace, the Mediterranean sea to my right and Tibidabo to my left. In the margin I wrote two words: me. Barcelona.

I am easy to spot. Tall for the first time in my life, a head above the crowd in every metro car. White in a sea of olive skin, though too dark-haired and ruddy, thanks to my Cherokee blood, to pass for one of the pale, sunburned Brits. Stocky in a city of Modigliani figures.

Sixty-eight, which here means the young keep leaping up to offer me their seats. I laugh, refuse, and thank them from the bottom of my heart. Nobody takes me for American, since so few of us actually live here; only a few thousand Americans in this metro area of several million. When I speak in Spanish, with a Castilian colloquialism or two, their surprise is my favorite moment of the day.

The Misfit

Here is the short version of my life. I didn’t fit in elementary school. I didn’t fit in high school. I didn’t fit at my first college. I spent thirty years leading music in megachurches and never fit there either, though I was very good at trying. And I never fit in America, the country that raised me to believe it was the best place on earth.

I fit here. Three years in, I can say it plainly. At a Barcelona table, I can raise a topic that would have emptied a genteel Tennessee dinner party, and nobody flinches. Someone leans in and asks a question back. An honest one. Uncensored.

Last month on my terrace, with several friends from Lebanon, Croatia, and China, the conversation wandered to circumcision. I can’t remember how. I mentioned that I’ve always wanted to ask my mother why I wasn’t circumcised and my brother Terry, born a year after me, was.

From there it went to Judaism, and my Lebanese friend said Muslim men are circumcised too, for health, she said. It’s cleaner.

I laughed out loud, partly at the argument and partly from the sheer joy of having this conversation at all, casually, over drinks, with no one embarrassed. “So you mutilate a baby to keep him healthy? Come on. You know why they did it. So it wouldn’t be so easy to masturbate.”

Now it was their turn to be shocked. Then it settled, and they nodded. Of course. Of course that’s why. I told them about the movie Road to Wellville, about American doctor and cereal king John Harvey Kellogg who openly promoted circumcision to curb masturbation; that is part of why it was routine in the hospitals of my childhood.

And then the follow-up comment, the Barcelona kind, with a knowing grin: “Well, now, Randy. Aren’t you the happy one?”

Try having that conversation at a Franklin dinner party.

The Withering

Stowe’s Paris letters turn serious one day in the Louvre. She has been thinking about beauty, and how her Connecticut childhood starved her of it. Then she writes this:

“With all New England’s earnestness and practical efficiency, there is a long withering of the soul’s more ethereal part—a crushing out of the beautiful—which is horrible.”

Children are born there, she says, with a sense of beauty as delicate as any child on earth, and it dies a lingering death of smothered desire. I know because I have felt it.

Twelve years ago, before I had ever read her, I wrote about the afternoon my pastor told me you can’t build a church on artists. I drove home and wept in my favorite chair. I wrote:

“Forty-seven years of legalism, rules, and regulations, twenty-five years of attending to everyone’s soul but my own.” And then: “My soul had finally withered away.”

Same word. A Connecticut preacher’s daughter in 1853 and an Appalachian preacher’s son in 2014, both reaching for withered.

Dry Eyes and Cool Hearts

Walking the Grande Galerie, Stowe found too many painters who worked “with dry eyes and cool hearts,” thinking of their technique and nothing of love or faith. She stood a full hour before Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa and forgot the room existed, because here was a man who had felt suffering from the inside.

I know dry eyes and cool hearts. I spent five decades questioning American sensibilities as Christians celebrated an artist like Thomas Kinkade, all technique and no heat. Here at the Museum of Forbidden Art, I channel Picasso’s spirit as a fellow voyeur of his sexually charged Fornarina series.

Here was a man who understood me. At eighty-six, Picasso drew Raphael painting and making love to his mistress at the same time, while the Pope squats on his chamber pot watching. A print of that drawing now graces my bathroom.

The Empty Cathedrals

Growing up, I heard the same thing about Europe over and over. Tired. Unambitious. Godless. Those great cathedrals standing empty. What a waste.

Really?

Stowe stood inside Notre-Dame and felt a sublimity she couldn’t put into words. I have stood in the candlelit basilica at Montserrat when no one else was there, my feet on a thousand years of stone and incense and pilgrimage, and knew I was in the thinnest of places.

Jumping Hedges

Stowe’s husband Charles barely spoke French, so he simply threw caution to the winds and talked. He called it a steeplechase, jumping over ditches and hedges, genders and cases.

That’s me everywhere I go. Gina calls my use of the Spanish language “bullshitting.” For example, I was using the word caliente instead of calor to describe the summer heat, and it was not until my Spanish teacher, Caty, laughingly told me that I was saying I felt horny rather than hot as in temperature, I replied, well, ambos es verdad (both are true). She raised her eyebrows, paused, shook her head, and we continued. And yes, I now know it’s ambos son verdad. I was bullshitting yet again.

Unknowing

For thirty years I was the man who knew. The arts pastor with the vision. The conference founder with the next big idea. The speaker on the platform with the answer.

Here I know almost nothing. I can’t follow the jokes at the next table. I don’t know which cheek to kiss first, or why everyone suddenly vanishes in August. I had no idea our neighborhood speaks Catalan over Spanish, two languages as different as day and night. Catalan sounds closer to French.

And yet, it is the most restful thing that has ever happened to me. Soy un desconocido, no sé nada. Stowe was right to put the two words side by side. Being unknown frees you from other people’s expectations. Being unknowing frees you from your own.

Three Weeks, Three Years

Here is where my story parts from hers. Stowe had a three-week journey, and then she went back home.

I did not go back; I live here: crazy mealtimes, language struggles, residency paperwork, lonely holidays, bureaucratic nightmares. The honeymoon had every chance to wear off, and it hasn’t. If anything, the ordinary is where it lives: the fishmonger who describes the fresh catch of the day and how to cook it, the friend who asks if my fantasy has come true, waits for the answer, then tells me his.

Cormac McCarthy said it: “Any artist is outside the mainstream.” For sixty-five years I took that outsideness as a defect, a wound to hide. Here it’s simply who I am. Unknown, and unknowing, and free.

Stowe wrote that her spirits always rose when she got among the French. Mine rise every day among the Spanish. They are my people. This is my country. The boy who was born with a hunger for beauty and nearly starved is finally feasting. At sixty-eight, I suspect (I know) my best work, my best life, is still ahead of me.