One Day, Two Cathedrals

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It’s been a while! I’ve just had a whirlwind tour of the Midwest, going from the annual meeting of my denomination in Cincinnati (I was officially approved for my tenure-track position, not without some drama after folks started googling my church) to presiding at a couple baptisms in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (the greatest of pastoral privileges) to visiting my family up in Duluth (July in Duluth is as close as we get to Eden). All this travel has really cut into my substack essay writing time. So, my apologies, faithful readers. Also, welcome to all the new subscribers who found me through my dear friend

Mari Andrew

’s newsletter Out of the Blue! Now to the content.

When I travel, there seems to be three general types of days. First, there is the day when everything goes wrong: The plane has mechanical problems and the flight crew times out. The bus to take you to your hotel arrives every half hour except on obscure holidays, and—good news!—today is one of those holidays. And the kitchen just closed at the last open restaurant in the city. Then there’s your typical day with a balance of highs and lows: It’s been raining for two days straight, but you just had life-changing pasta for lunch. The museum had a three-hour wait, but you stumbled upon a marvelous bookstore tucked away on a cobblestone backstreet and you’re about to take that library ladder for a spin a la Belle in the first act of Beauty and the Beast. Finally, there’s that day when everything just seems to go right, and even the seeming mishaps turn into something magical.

I want to talk about one of those magical days I experienced on my trip to France this fall. As I mentioned in previous posts, I co-led a class on arts and mission that took us from the museums of Paris to the monastic community of Taizé in the Burgundy region. On one of our days in Paris, we headed out to Chartres to tour the city’s legendary cathedral, renowned for its architectural grandeur and unreplicable stained glass (especially its unique “Chartres blue”).

Although I had been there before (how obnoxious is that introductory clause?), I couldn’t help but be struck anew by the majesty of the space and the artistry of the thousands of craftspeople—master builders, quarrymen, stone-cutters, plasterers, sculptors, masons— whose entire vocational life was offered as an oblation toward the creation of this place of Divine encounter. The space is sacralized not only by its beauty but also the devotion of the thousands upon thousands who labored and prayed and cleaned and married and presided and preached and blessed and baptized and grieved and communed and slept and sang in that space. Whenever I am in an old church like that, the last stanza of of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” comes to mind:

“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”

That afternoon, we were supposed to arrive back in Paris with enough time to take a short break before heading over to the Rodin Museum. I’m loathe to admit it, but the only thing I wanted to do at that point was go to a laundromat and wash my clothes. I had lost my phone on the flight there (after passing out and throwing up on myself mid-flight, which would fall under the first type of travel day—perhaps a story for another post!), and I think doing laundry gave me some semblance of control over my thus far chaotic trip. My clothes were just going into the dryer when the group was preparing to leave for the museum, so I resigned myself to staying behind and finishing. But my co-leader Paul talked me into going, and took on the responsibility of my tumbling clothes. I chased after the departing group, caught up with them halfway to the subway station, and made it to the museum with less than an hour to go before closing time—surely too little time to take in anything of substance.

The Rodin Museum, however, helped move me from the relentless ticking of chronos time to the spacious sufficiency of kairos. First, there is something unique and about a museum devoted to one artist’s work. It’s feels like a journey through their creative brain, a time-lapsed witnessing of the artist’s inchoate ideas and influences and skills that slowly develop into a coherent artistic vision. Second, there’s a certain type of sculpture, often large-scale pieces, that communicates in an uncannily embodied way. I’m not quite sure how to say it, but I could feel the substance or the weight or the presence of these sculptures in my chest. It was not a subject gazing at an inert object, but a subject gazing at another subject, and feeling that gaze returned somehow. I can feel the residual weight even as I write—almost a shortness of breath akin to that nervy first stage of falling in love.

I then came upon a particular piece that resonated most strongly within me. It depicted two right arms (thus two different people) from the elbows up that arched skyward, bending toward the top where their fingers just touched at the apex of the sculpture. The hands created this wonder of negative space between the two hands, somehow communicating both intimacy and space, communion without monistic union.

I stood transfixed, occasionally circling warily and wonderingly to view the hands from a different angle—feeling all the while that numinous presence of another subject. On one of my circumambulations, I peered down to read its title: “Cathedral.”

A jolt of awe and recognition ran through me; here too was a cathedral—not the grandeur of Chartres, but something more primal or elemental. Sacred space is not only gothic structures replete with flying buttresses and vaulted ceilings; it is also the simple encounter with another. Yet that meeting necessitates both the intimacy of touch and the offering of space—a creative tension. The sacred space can only be maintained when the subjects avoid either separating or collapsing into one. When that tension is held, a holy trysting place is conceived. The hollow space making hallowed space.

As a boy that grew up in a tradition (evangelicalism/Pentecostalism) and culture (Scandinavian) very uncomfortable with intimacy involving other bodies (and whose form of rebellion was going into liturgical studies!), I couldn’t help but think how much more comfortable I am with the sacrality of Chartres than the sacrality of intimacy with another. The cathedral inspires awe, but it does not require that my body, my very self, becomes a part of the edifice that holds the structure together. Yet, that type of arm’s-length holiness is bloodless, a sort of simulacrum of the sacred if it isn’t somehow bound to the flesh and blood—the always contingent carnality—of humanity. This seems, after all, to be at the heart of the incarnation.

The God of curved space, the dry
God is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood splattered
the hem of his mother’s robe.
-Jane Kenyon, “Looking at Stars”

To build a sacred space with other fallible human beings is a risky proposition that I still struggle to do, but it is also an artistry that rivals the construction of any cathedral and grounds us most fully in our fearful and wonderful humanity. I realized that day that I needed more cathedrals built by human touch and intimacy and space and not only wood and marble and stone.

But this wasn’t the end of the story. Inspired by the visit to the museum, I picked up Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin to read about the relationship between these two artists. In reading, I discovered that Rodin was long fascinated by cathedrals, and he spent much of his schoolboy days staring out of the classroom window at the Cathedral Saint-Pierre in Beauvais. Yet, he had a particular love for Chartres, inviting Rilke to visit the holy site with him. As Corbett relays,

“[Rilke] did not realistically have time to accept Rodin’s invitation to visit the cathedral in Chartres that month. But this was the “Acropolis of France,’ Rodin said, and he insisted that there was no lesson ‘so useful to study as our French Cathedrals, and, above all, this one!’ Rodin often said he wished that he had skipped art school altogether to spend the time bowed before the Chartres cathedral instead. The cathedral was the wises master, he thought, a masterpiece of light and shadow that could have taught Rembrandt everything he knew about chiaroscuro.”

The connection between Rodin and Chartres added what feels like another mystical element to my viewing of those two cathedrals on the same day, connecting the work of Rodin’s hands to his imaginative source—and finding Rodin’s “Cathedral” in turn becoming a source of inspiration for me. Perhaps this is how art works: source begets creation begets source begets creation down through the ages, branching out like a vast family tree of beauty and wonder, and we are the fortunate and grateful genealogists. To unknowingly take that pilgrimage from Chartres Cathedral to the “Cathedral” in the museum that day somehow validates the sense of being encountered and grasped by the art, heeding the demand made by Rilke’s torso of Apollo, “You must change your life.”

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Wonder-ings

• I’ve long been a fan of Nick Cave’s music, especially over the last several years as he’s made a turn toward the sacred in his work. Having lost two sons tragically, he speaks as a pilgrim who has journeyed through the wilderness of grief, but who doggedly continues to pursue beauty and wonder in that shadowed valley (his On Being interview is as good a starting place as any if you’re not familiar with him). One project that I am especially drawn to is The Red Hand Files, a forum where he takes questions submitted by fans and answers a sampling of them in his trademark darkly funny and poignant way. In his most recent answer, he ends his response to a person questioning the meaning of life in the midst of so much horror with an outlook I would like to embody:

B4, what are we doing here? That is an excellent question. Personally, I do my best to move through life with a joy that is reconciled to the sorrow of things but is not subsumed by it, that apprehends darkness and is not afraid of it. I try to receive some form of salvation in this life by paying witness to, and being lifted by, the great, uncontested value of existence. I feel duty-bound to unearth, enhance and promote the world’s beautiful things rather than obsess, worry and agitate over the worst of things. I believe in creation over destruction, compassion over cynicism, mercy over vitriol, friendship over hostility, truth over lies and love over hate. I remind myself that, at this moment, I am here as a happy and humble participant in the complex and relational nature of the universe…”

• Like many of you, I find myself often overwhelmed by the many pressing emergencies and impending disasters of our time (just the word “November” can send me into the fetal position). What can we do when the problems seem insurmountable and our choices forward limited to various unsavory options? I was heartened and challenged, then, to hear how mythologist and writer

  Martin Shaw
  ended his Scatterlings, a weird and wonderful meandering river of a book exploring the power of local myth and the necessity of being in and beholding a place long enough to hear the story it tells to those with ears to hear and eyes to see:

“Everywhere I go I meet people seeking a life of greater depth and intensity. But they also want speed, immediacy, stability, insurance. It may be that we cannot have all of both, that real compromise is at hand—that life must slow, that possibilities are not indeed endless, that we must be wilfully political in an attempt to wrestle power back to the local. And to handle that power well, we need to know what local is, what we stand for…Make a stand for something small, specific, and precious. Do it today. Amen and let it be so.”

• Connected to the necessary vulnerability and messiness of relationships, I find Jung’s insight to be especially helpful for those who grew up in fundamentalist traditions:

“Life itself flows from springs both clear and muddy. Hence all excessive purity lacks vitality. A constant striving for clarity and differentiation means a proportionate loss of vital intensity precisely because the muddy elements are excluded. Every renewal of life needs the muddy as well as the clear.”

May all of your skill and artistry and creativity and love be bent toward the building of sacred spaces of encounter.

Peace,
Dave