29/04/2024 – Wonders

We’ve both been battling colds this weekend. Encouraged by runny noses and cold, wet weather, we spent the weekend cosily at home.

Carey wants to be ignored when he is sick. This, naturally, goes against every fibre of my being. So, in our single, shared room, stoically ignoring him coughing beside me, I spent the hours watching “the Hollow Crown” (the BBC production of Shakespeare’s history plays, from Richard II to Richard III). It is gripping, vast mythmaking, a literal/literary sibling to the Bible. It was such a luxury use of time, and ensured I made no fuss while Carey recovered.

Speaking of Kings… before the lurgy set in, we went to glorious Saint Chapelle.

Housed in the medieval royal palace on the Île de la Cité, (now the French Court of Appeal and the Civil High Court), Sainte Chapelle was built by King Lous IX. The very best that thirteenth century “Christendom” and its “most Christian” (soon to be sainted) king could muster was employed to build a chapel to hold the most holy crown – the crown of thorns (bought, so it is reported, for 135,000 livres from the Emperor of Byzantium).

The chapel is a jewel-box of glass and gilding. Almost without stone, it soars over 42m high. Most of the glass has survived almost eight hundred years. In the mid-nineteenth century, a third replaced from other medieval windows, or recast with traditional techniques. The whole was removed and hidden during World War II. It was again, painstakingly, restored a decade ago.

The latest performance venue/experience is the Sphere in Las Vegas – a multi-sensory space that vibrates with a heightened shared experience. I will never go there. I’m too old, too unwilling to be overwhelmed with noise and neon for “fun”. But, even after eight centuries, Saint Chapelle thrills with craft, colour, light. Today it is still filled with voices. In its time (now easily imagined) there was music, chant, incense, ritual… It is a sumptuous, sensory place that uplifts, transports you. It is deconsecrated today, a museum, but I still stood a while in prayer.

To visit Saint Chapelle is a pilgrimage, a centering, an intersection: ancient yet vibrant, deconsecrated yet inherently sacred, symbol of both spiritual and temporal authority. Still standing, through the fall of Monarchy, the rise of five Republics and two World Wars, marking and marked by each. Still powerful, still awe-inspiring, it is a profound place to stand, think, pray.

So, this was a week for noting the interplay of time, the works of kings: Saint Chapelle, with its laser-treated, ancient glass and extra, X-ray security (a terrorism trial next door); streaming Shakespeare’s Plantagenet plays. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (Ozymandias, P.B. Shelley)

Our news is all of the end of days – floods, climate change, war, suffering. The days were always thus. We just knew less and more slowly. And yet, truthfully, humbly, I must also say my days are full of undeserved wonders. I am very grateful.