Aesthetic Spirituality

I'm a rationalist, and an atheist. But. But...I can still appreciate the beauty and 'sacredness' of the things that religious people do, and the rituals and music that buttress their beliefs.

It doesn't matter if those things are Christian, or Muslim, or Hindu, or what: it's the beauty of the thing as a work of art, and the sincere, hopeful beliefs of the people that speak to me. Doctrine, separatism, dogmatism, exclusion and monopolies on the truth are not my bag, but I can recognise, identify with, and respect the basic human desire to believe in something. It's only the structures, authorities, hierarchies, hatreds, victimisations, inspiration for killings, and monolithic belief systems that get on my wick. (That is quite a price to pay for a bit of aesthetic reward, I admit.)

Anyway.

When I was in Paris a few weeks back, I spent a lovely day (it was Good Friday) walking around the Ile de la Cite and Ile Saint Louis in the sunshine, sitting down on the quaysides (or anywhere else I fancied), and watching the world go by. (There's something about Paris that makes me much more comfortable doing that than I would be in -- say -- London or New York. Something about scale /the sense of threat (?).

About 5 o'clock, I was feeling knackered, so decided to head back to the hotel. As a final sop to the spirit of exploration/the flaneur stylee, I diverted myself into a shadowed side street on the Ile Saint Louis. There was a tall stone wall on the left, and a flight of steps up to a wide doorway, whose double doors stood open. As I passed, I heard the sound of singing from inside. I nearly walked on, as my subconscious was saying "Don't turn round and look, or you'll look like a bloody tourist -- keep your head down and move on." Fortunately, I had the strength of will to ignore that miserabilist version of Jiminy Cricket, and I did turn back and climb those steps.

The voices were all female, soprano lines rising into the arched roof spaces of the church. High up, sunlight was still shining on the white painted arches and the decorated ceiling. There was a lot of gilding up there, shining in the light.

A congregation of forty or so were seated around the nave in a u-shape; mostly over-50s, but a few younger faces, too. The singers were nuns, I think, all dressed in blue habits. (I saw the word 'Carmelites' on a wall plaque, so I guess there was a nunnery attached to the church.) I looked around a pillar -- though I didn't want to be too obtrusive and intrude on these people's devotions -- and could see a load of younger blokes in bright white robes, and the 'big cheeses' up the front, elderly blokes with gold and red bits on top of the white.

The nuns were doing some kind of plainchant thing, and the simple rise and fall of the melodic lines made me think of the music of Hildegaard of Bingen. Later on, the white-robed servers (?) joined in as well, adding a tenor resonance to the music. The sound echoed around the big space, soothing and hypnotic in its simplicity.

As the sun sank outside, the light on the gilding crept slowly towards the top of the arches, trailing shadow below it. The patterned light and shadows from the tracery windows tracked slowly up the blank white surfaces of the vaulting.

A pretty, very smartly dressed young woman with lovely clean hair caught my eye, and she smiled faintly at me before turning back towards the service. I wondered what was going on inside her head, on that day of high holiness for believers, and I wondered how this religion fitted into her everyday life -- whether this was a one-off, like our visits to midnight mass at Christmas when I was a child, or whether this was a regular thing for her. Narrow-mindedly, perhaps, I struggled to reconcile all this dogma and ritual with the modernity and self-assuredness of her dress and manner. At one stage, a friend or relative came up behind her and placed their hand on her shoulder: she jumped, a bit spooked, and did that thing where you put your hand over your heart and pat it in a palpitating type way, silently signalling "You frightened the life out of me!

Later, these two women knelt, and I could see their clothes stretched tight across their arched backs. They looked vulnerable and small, and it felt strange to see people abasing themselves, almost as if it negated their humanity in some way. It felt almost voyeuristic to be watching all these people as they went about their devotions. Then they stood up and took part in a ritual that felt medieval to me: everyone lined up at the back of the church, then processed, in pairs, to where a couple of the servers were holding up a six foot cross, which looked like it was cloth-covered, or embroidered -- there was a wealth of gold and red stitching on it. Each pair of people bent, or kneeled, and kissed the foot of the cross (the servers tipped the bottom up for some of the more elderly people, who were too frail to bend or kneel). Again, it felt a bit weird to be seeing this kind of thing in 2005.

I'd been standing there, listening to the singing and the responses, and watching the service, for about an hour and a half. Some part of me felt jealous, and wanted to be a part of these rituals, to be inside this circle of belief and certainty. But the rest of me felt uncomfortable with this surrender of the self, the subjugation of the critical faculties in the face of these mysteries. I did feel glad, though, that I could still feel some kind of a sense of wonder when I heard the music drifting through that vaulted stone building. I never want to lose that ability. I'll always want my rationalism to coexist with a wordless, aesthetic sense of the sublime.