Notre Dame de Chartres after a night-long snow
A Tale of Two Cathedrals with the same Names
Ive spent the night at Chartes yesterday, thinking that the morning after will prove to be better in documenting the Cathedral and at least two other churches in the area. It was not the early evening at 430pm that defeated me, but the uncanny icy cold weather. My wife and I were unprepared for this as our last trip outside Paris in Normandy was just inconvenienced by rain. An umbrella would not do well against assaults of sidewinding gusts that were Siberian-cold. Last night I went to sleep dissatisfied with the renovation works of the Cathedral that had blocked access both to the Sancta Camisa (relic of a tunic of the Virgin Mary) and the Chapel of St-Piat. The only consolation we had was having the chance to see and hear a special Mass at the Cathedral - giving us a glimpse of Notre Dame de Chartres in action as a ceremonial space with a bishop presiding over the liturgy with a manic pace. Earlier we saw him walking across the southern portal to the Archbishops residence, and I was quite surprised to see a man in a red cape, a mitre and a staff walking briskly that I thought some prank was going on and someone dressed like St. Nicholas was doing rounds of the houses. The prankster turned out to be the officiator of the evening mass!
We decided on waking up at 7am to have an early start in exploring this small city of 45,000 souls. On the map Chartres was a simple community with a single four-lane highway as its periphery and the hill of the Cathedral as its center. This divides the city center into two levels - lower and upper - which are connected together with five Medieval roads or steps called Tertres. These roads form part of two tourist circuits, one that passes through old, half-timbered houses and churches and the other follows the Eure river north to south going to the direction of Dreux, a town next to Chartres.
Imagine our surprise when we woke up and erroneously thought it was 9am and opened the hotel windows to reveal a night sky of 5am...and Chartres was blanketed in snow! We hastily dressed up warmly (or thought we did) and walked out into the courtyard and stepped into the fresh powder, crunching beneath our every step! We had coffee and tea in small cups but the snow flakes fell into them and I had to drink my latte before it chilled. Because I was wearing running shoes the cold wet snow instantly seeped through my soles and into my socks - I called it quits after my feet hurt but returned to snow thumping in the grounds of the Cathedral after we had breakfast and the sun had risen casting a salmon-colored glow on every limestone building.
One American priest had commented in a video that Chartres has the power to move people only that it does not have an effect because of certain barriers imposed by the visitor against this feeling. But once Chartres has caught a lacuna in this barrier, the senses are flooded and some feel being put at ease with attendant feelings of grace and peace. In Chartres today that image was the snow-laden Gothic cathedral. It was like the romantic paintings of Caspar Friedrich had suddenly become real and has swallowed me whole. I fell to a flurry of trigger-happy photo shoots, especially of the Northern portal, and of course, of the snowy landscape.
It was after all our very first taste of winter. And my first playful deed with snow was to scoop up handfuls of it from the bridges along the Eure river and hurling at the ducks that swam towards me when I dropped a few ice balls in the water.
After checking out of Hotellerie Saint-Yves we tried visiting the old gothic church of Saint-Pierre and the tangled mess of a church that is Saint-Aignan. Then in the rain we walked to the Gare, taking a long route back to Chartres Cathedral to say our goodbyes to this charming town that looked like Christmas Village overnight. The walk to the train station was wet, cold and feet-numbing.
---
Back in Paris we half-expected the city to be covered in snow as well: we were wrong. It was just wet with rain. On the train ride back, we espied the grounds of Versailles covered in white powder. We unpacked quickly because we wanted to catch the public presentation of the Crown of Thorns at Notre Dame de Paris at 3pm.
We arrived in the Cathedral just in time to queue in with others that were going to venerate the sacred relic. My wife was emotional as I was, well, curious. But what took me aback was the charged atmosphere of almost a fully packed church praying.
This relic is actually a ring of rushes of a jujube plant, said to have been acquired by Louis IX, or St. Louis from Venetian bankers who kept them as collateral for a loan taken by Baldwin II, Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Thorns from this ring, counting to almost 70, are in possession of various churches in Europe. Despite the fact that there is no proof that this is the real thing worn by Christ, its the aura brought about by 1600 years of veneration that keeps this relic holy, at least in my regard.
Despite this "barrier" of cynicism, I took the chance to touch the rock-crystal reliquary and stooped closer to examine the plant-forms within, feigning a form of obeisance. Yet when my forehead touched the glass I felt some inexplicable electricity that suddenly cleared my head of all thoughts. It was surprising enough for me to back away slowly, and silently I tried to understand this trigger and what lifeworld it had set off or memory it invoked within.
I suddenly remembered my boyhood Catholicism, much the same way Joseph Campbell rediscovered his in Chartres. I recalled being extremely religious to the point of volunteering to serves as an altar boy at nine and a Bible student at ten! I was reminded of my childhood dreams of being a priest, or a monk, and my crazy adaptations of the Augustinian Rule to my daily life while in my first two years of high school. (I took the pseudonym of Augustine when I was 13 in honor of the saint) All these forms of piety I really tried hard to practice until I discovered how oppressive "acting" or "roleplaying" was in traditional religion. I told myself: I missed talking to a God sometimes, and I missed having a sense of being guided in times of embarrassing hardships.
Then something that Neale Donald Walsch had experienced occurred; I heard an inner voice that responded to my nostalgic musings in an assuring tone: Go on, its okay. Move forward. I just hoped it was the guy behind me whispering to have a go at the relic. People have spoken of a supra-consciousness, or a higher mind that was also a complex within awareness. Was this it?
Whatever it is the experience gave me an inner resolve that whatever I am working on isnt that bad at all.
---
So the challenge of barriers have been won not by only by Notre Dame de Chartres but also by Notre Dame de Paris.
Ive spent the night at Chartes yesterday, thinking that the morning after will prove to be better in documenting the Cathedral and at least two other churches in the area. It was not the early evening at 430pm that defeated me, but the uncanny icy cold weather. My wife and I were unprepared for this as our last trip outside Paris in Normandy was just inconvenienced by rain. An umbrella would not do well against assaults of sidewinding gusts that were Siberian-cold. Last night I went to sleep dissatisfied with the renovation works of the Cathedral that had blocked access both to the Sancta Camisa (relic of a tunic of the Virgin Mary) and the Chapel of St-Piat. The only consolation we had was having the chance to see and hear a special Mass at the Cathedral - giving us a glimpse of Notre Dame de Chartres in action as a ceremonial space with a bishop presiding over the liturgy with a manic pace. Earlier we saw him walking across the southern portal to the Archbishops residence, and I was quite surprised to see a man in a red cape, a mitre and a staff walking briskly that I thought some prank was going on and someone dressed like St. Nicholas was doing rounds of the houses. The prankster turned out to be the officiator of the evening mass!
We decided on waking up at 7am to have an early start in exploring this small city of 45,000 souls. On the map Chartres was a simple community with a single four-lane highway as its periphery and the hill of the Cathedral as its center. This divides the city center into two levels - lower and upper - which are connected together with five Medieval roads or steps called Tertres. These roads form part of two tourist circuits, one that passes through old, half-timbered houses and churches and the other follows the Eure river north to south going to the direction of Dreux, a town next to Chartres.
Imagine our surprise when we woke up and erroneously thought it was 9am and opened the hotel windows to reveal a night sky of 5am...and Chartres was blanketed in snow! We hastily dressed up warmly (or thought we did) and walked out into the courtyard and stepped into the fresh powder, crunching beneath our every step! We had coffee and tea in small cups but the snow flakes fell into them and I had to drink my latte before it chilled. Because I was wearing running shoes the cold wet snow instantly seeped through my soles and into my socks - I called it quits after my feet hurt but returned to snow thumping in the grounds of the Cathedral after we had breakfast and the sun had risen casting a salmon-colored glow on every limestone building.
One American priest had commented in a video that Chartres has the power to move people only that it does not have an effect because of certain barriers imposed by the visitor against this feeling. But once Chartres has caught a lacuna in this barrier, the senses are flooded and some feel being put at ease with attendant feelings of grace and peace. In Chartres today that image was the snow-laden Gothic cathedral. It was like the romantic paintings of Caspar Friedrich had suddenly become real and has swallowed me whole. I fell to a flurry of trigger-happy photo shoots, especially of the Northern portal, and of course, of the snowy landscape.
It was after all our very first taste of winter. And my first playful deed with snow was to scoop up handfuls of it from the bridges along the Eure river and hurling at the ducks that swam towards me when I dropped a few ice balls in the water.
After checking out of Hotellerie Saint-Yves we tried visiting the old gothic church of Saint-Pierre and the tangled mess of a church that is Saint-Aignan. Then in the rain we walked to the Gare, taking a long route back to Chartres Cathedral to say our goodbyes to this charming town that looked like Christmas Village overnight. The walk to the train station was wet, cold and feet-numbing.
---
Back in Paris we half-expected the city to be covered in snow as well: we were wrong. It was just wet with rain. On the train ride back, we espied the grounds of Versailles covered in white powder. We unpacked quickly because we wanted to catch the public presentation of the Crown of Thorns at Notre Dame de Paris at 3pm.
We arrived in the Cathedral just in time to queue in with others that were going to venerate the sacred relic. My wife was emotional as I was, well, curious. But what took me aback was the charged atmosphere of almost a fully packed church praying.
This relic is actually a ring of rushes of a jujube plant, said to have been acquired by Louis IX, or St. Louis from Venetian bankers who kept them as collateral for a loan taken by Baldwin II, Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Thorns from this ring, counting to almost 70, are in possession of various churches in Europe. Despite the fact that there is no proof that this is the real thing worn by Christ, its the aura brought about by 1600 years of veneration that keeps this relic holy, at least in my regard.
Despite this "barrier" of cynicism, I took the chance to touch the rock-crystal reliquary and stooped closer to examine the plant-forms within, feigning a form of obeisance. Yet when my forehead touched the glass I felt some inexplicable electricity that suddenly cleared my head of all thoughts. It was surprising enough for me to back away slowly, and silently I tried to understand this trigger and what lifeworld it had set off or memory it invoked within.
I suddenly remembered my boyhood Catholicism, much the same way Joseph Campbell rediscovered his in Chartres. I recalled being extremely religious to the point of volunteering to serves as an altar boy at nine and a Bible student at ten! I was reminded of my childhood dreams of being a priest, or a monk, and my crazy adaptations of the Augustinian Rule to my daily life while in my first two years of high school. (I took the pseudonym of Augustine when I was 13 in honor of the saint) All these forms of piety I really tried hard to practice until I discovered how oppressive "acting" or "roleplaying" was in traditional religion. I told myself: I missed talking to a God sometimes, and I missed having a sense of being guided in times of embarrassing hardships.
Then something that Neale Donald Walsch had experienced occurred; I heard an inner voice that responded to my nostalgic musings in an assuring tone: Go on, its okay. Move forward. I just hoped it was the guy behind me whispering to have a go at the relic. People have spoken of a supra-consciousness, or a higher mind that was also a complex within awareness. Was this it?
Whatever it is the experience gave me an inner resolve that whatever I am working on isnt that bad at all.
---
So the challenge of barriers have been won not by only by Notre Dame de Chartres but also by Notre Dame de Paris.
We woke up to see Chartres transformed into Santas Village
Battling with the ducks at the Eure River
North tympanum, chartres
My shot of the relics of the Crown of Thorns
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