Chartres Cathedral, France

Thought that you might like to read an account of a visit I paid to Chartres cathedral last summer    I've written it up as an 800 word article, so it's longer than most of my posts.  Although I'm not particularly religious, Chartres made a huge impression on me.

Here's what I thought:
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Chartes Cathedral - Pointing the way to God


The French cathedral of Chartres seems like a great big medieval loudspeaker broadcasting GOD,  GOD, GOD, GOD, GOD.  Right in the centre of the town, it entirely dominates its small square, overshadowing the surrounding jumble of old houses, cafes, shops, bars, luxuriant flowerbeds.   

Its two un-matching spires point at the sky, and the carvings of its stone facade seem as alive as the flowers.

To pilgrims flocking here over centuries, this huge building's elaborate decoration must have seemed like a great story book of faith.  Each carved image has a meaning, a significance.  Perhaps the biggest of its set pieces is the one above the main entrance, which shows the Apocalypse of Christ in Glory, surrounded by beasts representing the four Evangelists, and the twelve Apostles, and a host of angels.

Step inside and you're engulfed in breathless dimness, with immensely high, thin windows sparkling gently all around like jewelled kaleidoscopes.  Most of Chartres' glass dates from the thirteenth century.

It shows saints, parables, scenes from the Life of Christ, all the usual things; but for me the most touching and fascinating images are placed humbly in the  lowest panels of the windows.  These show the human beings who actually paid the cost of this place.  Here they are, these little half naked people, as brightly coloured as they were eight hundred years ago, toiling at menial tasks. Water carriers, stripped to the waist, with the jars they've hauled up the cripplingly steep hill from the river; cobblers, mending the worn-out shoes of people who could not afford to buy new.

Can you discern them in my rather blurry picture?  With their hand-tools and ox-carts, they lived hard lives,  and we would, perhaps, think them primitive if we saw them at work.  Yet their achievement, in creating this soaring building, illuminates how the power of their faith and the range of their thinking transcended the physical hardship of their lives. 

The stone labyrinth in the floor of the cathedral continues the theme of offering toil and hardship to achieve grace. It is set flush into the nave, and every Friday the chairs are moved away to reveal it fully. You are supposed to follow it upon your knees, welcoming physical discomfort or even pain, to make the difficult progress towards the holy centre.

Chartres has always attracted pilgrims who come to venerate its holy relic of the Virgin Mary and admire its marvels, and the place is full of people wandernig about simply gazing at it all.

There is no entrance fee, but in our secular age, those who care for the cathedral must work hard to keep the visitors coming, and spending. So they have hit upon the idea of small groups touring the crypt by candlelight, and that's what I have decided to do during my visit to the city.

At night, the cathedral is brightly floodlit, but I gather with the rest of the group at the pitch-dark entrance to the crypt, far from the golden spires above and even further away from the dazzling sunlight of midday.   Everyone has a tall, wax candle, and these are the only light as we descend into total darkness.

 It is an extraordinary experience to progress slowly beneath the low ceilings, gazing at the wall paintings by the light of the flickering candles.

And not only paintings, but several eerily tall Gothic statues are preserved here. Survivors of a twelfth-century conflagration, they rise over three metres, taller and far thinner than any normal person.  Yet these   weirdly elongated statues have beautiful, naturalistic heads, which give them a compelling, eerie presence.

The sculptor Rodin was enthralled by them, and he studied them for days and weeks, trying to pin down what it was that made them so fascinating.  Eventually, though, he wrote to his family that he thought he could produce something that looked like them - but the could never produce anything that actually was like them.

At the far end of the crypt, stairs lead upwards into the darkened, silent cathedral itself.   Votive candles in red glass holders flicker in bright pools of white and scarlet, reflecting dimly off polished stone, but there is no other light.  With the twenty-first century banished for now, I can barely see the walls and roof some distance away, for the great glass windows permit only the faintest moonlight. The only way to understand the size of the place by the echoes of my own whispers, returning from the shadows.

It is overwhelming, and on summer evenings, a son-et-lumiere show outside in the square regularly lightens the atmosphere.   Shortly after dark, music starts booming from cunningly positioned loudspeakers, and the cathedral’s facade becomes a towering screen for moving images representing its history: the kings and queens,

the fires, the burnings, and the cold and tumbling stones of war

and eventually the dove of peace.  Superficially, it isn't unlike the kind of show I've seen at Walt Disney World in Florida, but the difference is that,  beneath the moving colours, the wall carvings continue to gaze out with the dignity of hundreds of years. 

Let them be happy with their lights,they seem to say, for we will always stay the same. Today it is son-et-lumiere, and neatly tended flower-beds, and people sitting around in bars.  But next century, and the century after that - who knows what we will see?