Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
Two miles in a very strong mist (or light drizzle), coffee and hot breakfast, Morning Prayer, work on tomorrow mornin’s sermon for the eight o’clock (I’m under firm, strict, and pointed instruction to keep the homily short), a jaunt into Oxford to bid farewell, au revoir, to Richard and Jim and Teilo, and back home to polish the homily and get a bit of relaxation before tomorrow morning.
Assuming I follow the trajectory I set out on in my sermon prep, the inaudible soundtrack playing while I preach will be from Steve Earle and the Dukes — but the reason I invoke it ahead of that hour is that after weeks of lamenting the absence of summer in Britain these past months, I am now regarding the undeniably summery weather with a deprecatory side-eye and thinking, ‘Enough is enough’. I mostly walked on my morning run, and even at that I was tired and soaking when I finished. I sit upstairs in the living room and try not to move a muscle lest I begin overheating. And tonight I will no doubt toss and turn, bitterly resentful of ever degree above… well, no specific temperature, because I would surely complain about the chill in the air if it were cooler tonight than I’ve come to expect.
But I did my run, had my fruit and coffee breakfast, then more coffee at a long cafe meeting, sketched a sermon approach, and am drowsily reading a book for review (instead of grinding out more words on my overdue essay).
When we were in Brussels, Margaret and I made one unsuccessful, and one very successful trip to Notre-Dame-de-la-Chapelle, Our Lady of the Chapel or the Chapel Church. It was one of the last churches we got to, on the last full day of our visit. The Chapel Church has, more than the other grand gothic churches in Brussels, retained the familiar side-chapels-along-the-nave style. We entered, turned right (to the east, I think, though the liturgical south) and wandered toward the transept and choir, then back down the west (liturgical north) aisle, looking in at chapels and shrines, and pausing for prayer where so moved.
The next-to-last chapel at the south (west) end of the west (north) aisle caught my attention particularly. In front of the crucifix was placed a statue of Our Lady, swathed in black, with the rays emanating from her halo-crown left dark (either deliberately or as a result of aging). She stands in front of the crucifix, but does not look at her crucified son. This particular image contrasted sharply with the standard plaster-pastel devotional statues.
I was struck by several features of the chapel and took a couple photos, then noticed an explanatory placard in Dutch and French (of course), so I grabbed a photo of the placard and opted to read it carefully later. Today was ‘later’. The placard did not, as I’d have assumed, give details of artist and date, origin and significance of the chapel. Rather, it quotes from a devotional essay by Belgian semi-surrealist dramatist, essayist, and short story writer Michel de Ghelderode.
Man is alone in life; he is so in his cradle as he will be so in his deathbed; he is so in love… Solitude is a gift, a grace or a disgrace that the fairy veiled in in grey brings to the newborn, while the kind fairies go away into a worldly tumult.
A woman fills up my existence. She is neither the accomplished whore nor the tender middle-class woman whom you’re imagining. But neither is she an imaginary creature. You can see her as I see her, but you could not understand or love her. She is a noble [great, grande] woman, and a solitary. Better: she is Solitude.
She whom I so frequently visit, and whom the most brilliant procession would not stop me from rejoining — I declare her in every way superior to womankind and of incomparable eminence, even though judging by her appearance she would seem the least of all.
But as I without wearying see her, steadfastly good and of funereal radiance she was in times past, when the hordes of Alvarez of Toledo advanced silently against the Low Countries; this army of wild and pitiless men, these men alone and without human connections, trailing behind them a few wagons filled with dried straw, but carrying in the forest of their lances this great Lady, their mother and their friend, Princess of Solitude.
Of these armies there is nothing left but bones and rusted blades. However, their holy shrine has remained in the Netherlands, incomparably alone, an alien ascetic under black silk, the only one of her race in our provinces from which Spain departed when for them, the sun set on Flanders.
Lady Mary? Few know that she stands in this old fallen temple which the flood of the rabble tramples, in this chapel of the transept, shameful virgin among her cousins, the other virgins, the radiant, glorious, beaming matrons, squeezed into sheets of gold sprinkled with rubies and fine pearls, all crowned and all blissful.
Those others, the Brabantines, they have good reason to exult: they hold their child, the Child with varnished cheeks, and Calvary is still far away… But for Spanish Mary, all is finished.… She dresses in mourning. Her olive complexion, her bloodless lips, her dry hands, her burnt eyelids show her extreme acquiescence, the limit that her sorrows reached.
The angels are absent; they don’t support her, no spectacle plays out around her. But on the wall the crucified cadaver hangs, pallid blue, a little swollen. This realistic presence isn’t something to which the Mother turns her back; it’s a corpse. With a corpse, one is alone.
And Lady Mary remains alone, from whom the faithful turn away, as she herself turns away from the corpse. How does she resemble this ‘Queen of Heaven’ of the litanies? She can only be called the Lady of Solitude, to whom come only several widows, to pray. Rarely a man will stop, always an old man.
Lady Mary… It’s she whom I visit early in the morning, and occasionally at night. I sit by the corner of her altar as one would sit at the hearth. I greet her, and I remain in silence. I say nothing to her, I ask nothing of her, I confess nothing to her. Her presence is soothing to me, and I sense that mine pleases her.
Michel de Ghelderode, ‘Nuestra Señora de la Soledad’, in Sortilèges: et autres contes crépusculaires (Bruxelles: Éditions Labor, 2001) 159–163 passim.
I started out startled by the fairies and the ‘accomplished whore’ (and the bourgeois woman) — where did they come from, what is going on here? But as I read on, I was intrigued, provoked, and in the end deeply moved by Ghelderode’s evocation of this foreign, left-behind, Virgin, bereft of her Son, consoling the not-quite believing Ghelderode, and welcoming his presence.
My morning run was made less unpleasant by a very light rain — more than mist, less than proper rain — cooling the air and the runner. Then Morning Prayer (at home, not at church, cos it’s August), coffee and fruit, and a morning working on my current essay, with brief intervals indulging Margaret’s fascination for Veronicah short videos. Day by day, word by word, slowly I turn [this miscellany of ideas into an actual coherent essay].