Autumn

It's autumn, my first European autumn since 1966. The best of my childhood memories include many from this season: apples and pears finally officially harvested (in contrast to the premature, clandestine, sour pickings of summer); then piles of golden leaves and a hedgehog caught up in the sweepings; the dark wooden shine of chestnuts bursting from their prickly shells; crisp days, soup for supper and the smell of bonfires. Here in Paris it has been damper than I recall and I have spent too many days inside at my books, but for the last two Sundays we have walked in beautiful autumn gardens, Versailles and the Tuileries. We’ve breathed in late flowering roses, feasted on the shifting tones of blue and purple blooms, watched for the turning of the leaves. Palace gardens set against the changing sky: a persistent steely grey last Sunday, and this week a changing drama of dark clouds and sunlight.

Autumn has brought many other delights. At the end of one fruitless work day last week we did a circuit of the islands and then secured a table in a café-bar that looks over the Seine to Notre Dame. With cooler days chaud vin had appeared on the black board, and so we basked in the last half hour of slanty sunshine sipping a warm brew of wine and spices. And on Saturday, an unexpected afternoon of pleasure: lunch and good conversation with friends of friends, here to celebrate a significant wedding anniversary. There have been wonderful concerts too, including Verdi’s Requiem performed by a bunch of medicos from Germany as a fundraiser for Medicins Sans Frontiers. Brilliant. The bass was, in his spare time, a professor of paediatrics. Europe is so cultured.

Autumn has always been my favourite season. But after autumn comes winter, its darkness, the cold. As children this sense of the closing in of life, the coming of winter, is less of a weight. Is it because we live then more in the moment? Or perhaps it is because, then, we were not burdened by so much experience so can live more lightly.

Walking home from St Eustache after Verdi we saw, as ever, the other Paris. Men and women dossed down in doorways for the night, layered with sleeping bags, blankets, plastic. And when it rains? And is colder?

I have been pondering the beggars, the street folk and the homeless ever since our arrival here, and have made little progress. There is a beggar at the door of every church. Never has the story Jesus tells of the rich man and poor Lazarus at the gate seemed so vivid. To give or not to give? And what? I try at least to give the dignity of a greeting in my stumbling French to those I see regularly, but the questions still nag.

Around the quartier of Saint Paul, were we shop, there is stable group of homeless, mostly men. In the mornings they are usually gathered around a corner near a supermarket, where in ones or twos they take turns in looking out for each others’ bags and bedding. At night they sleep near our apartment on a wide veranda underneath the Cité des Arts building on the Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, which runs parallel with the Seine. The veranda is a prized place of good shelter and at night it turns into a long dormitory. Is this a choice of sorts? There are government run shelters, but here, I’ve observed a sense of fraternity, care and community. Fragile though it might be, it’s something we all desire and call home. The roads to the street here, like everywhere are multiple; and the solutions?

One of the most loved figures of twentieth century France was Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), a tireless worker for the poor, for refugees, the homeless. In the cold winter of 1954, in the face of an increasing number of deaths among the homeless in Paris, he called for “An Uprising of Kindness” (insurrection de la bonté). A savy political operator he targeted the conservative rich and their wallets opened, helping the growth of the Emmaus communities, which provided shelter, food and hope for the homeless poor. The work of his foundation continues. When we first arrived in Paris we visited the Place des Vosges, an exquisite symmetrical Renaissance square that once housed the aristocracy, now simply the rich. Hanging from three of the windows (how did they get there?) were banners proclaiming the incidence of homelessness in present day France: “at least 100 000 live in the street”; “600 000 people have no personal housing”. Government statistics, like those on poverty, are contested. What can’t be contested though are “les morts dans la rue”, the deaths in the streets. There is a small collective based in Paris that since 2002 has collected information about the men and women who have died on the street or when living on the street. In 2009 they documented over 400 deaths. Their average age is 49.

I walked up to the Place des Vosges this afternoon to see if the Foundation Abbé Pierre banners were still there. They aren’t, but the homeless, in their various habitual spots, are. It is a bitterly cold afternoon and it is not even winter yet. And I wonder whether, living amongst them, there is still the Dominican brother that Timothy Radcliffe once spoke of – a true mendicant of Christ, returning to base just once a week for a meal and a hot shower.

Not Paris, Chartres

Last week we had a break from Paris. We’d been to Chartres before and loved it and so, even though it is an easy day trip from Paris, we decided to stay overnight. John found reasonably priced accommodation in a former monastery right behind the cathedral. It was perfect: predictably basic, our room had large casement windows and a view of the spires. It instantly felt retreat-like, which is what we both actually needed, so we re-booked for two nights.

Our first view of Chartres as we walked up the hill from the railway station was through a ferris wheel. An interesting juxtaposition that had me pausing to take a photograph (the first of many). Why the fun fair? After a quick visit to the tourist centre we discovered that we had missed, by precisely one day, the illuminations of Chartres which now run from April to September each year. Over the weekend, the season had closed with a special Fête de la lumiere, parades and music, and a last hurrah for the coloured lights ( http://www.chartresenlumieres.com/).

Illuminations have taken off. Back in Canberra I have delighted in seeing old Parliament House bathed in pink, and when travelling across town check the current colour the tower on Black Mountain. Even better was Brian Eno’s spectacular lighting of the Sydney Opera House last year. As we wandered around the old town of Chartres over the next two days we saw evidence of the illuminations – from the large glass and metal boxes that have become semi-permanent fixtures to the discreet footpath lights that mark the night walk through the town. It must look amazing!

In the Middle Ages there were different attractions of course. In the ninth century Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald, donated a piece of cloth to the cathedral which was supposed to have been worn by Mary when she give birth to Jesus. It ensured that Chartres became a place of pilgrimage and thereby boosted the local economy. The Virgin’s veil was an effective fundraiser. Later Chartres emerged as the foremost scholastic school in Europe. The present, astonishing cathedral building dates primarily from the eleventh century. It is the last of a long line of buildings that had succumbed to pillage or fire. Whilst it suffered the standard re-dedication as a “Temple of Reason” during the Revolution, some citizens of Chartres saved it from planned demolition. If nothing else, argued the architect Morin, it would be very difficult to achieve. Indeed!

What do people come to see now? The building of course, the “most perfect” Gothic cathedral. And the glass. Chartres cathedral houses the most important collection of medieval stained glass in the world, including the famous Blue Virgin dating from the mid-12th century. And stone. The 12th Western Portals and the 13th century North and South porches: a remarkably intact ensemble of medieval sculpture. And, of course, for the contemporary spiritual seeker, the Labyrinth, the largest and best preserved from medieval France. And no, there is no evidence that medieval pilgrims circled round its paths on their knees (see http://www.labyrinthos.net/chartresfaq.html for some nice myth busting).

Pilgrimage is an oddly persistent human occupation. Moving in order to see better, more clearly, I think. The danger with modern tourism is, of course, that we see nothing, nothing at all, in the everything that we try to take in (a tendency typified by the pervasive phenomenon of taking photographs of artworks in museums rather than actually looking at them). A real pilgrimage, one that is open to discovery, seeing anew, takes courage. And here I think of a pilgrim I met today outside Notre-Dame de Paris. He wanted to look inside the cathedral but was not allowed in because he was carrying a large backpack. I offered, in a stumbling mixture of French and English, to mind his bag for a few minutes. He reached into his coat and pulled out piece of paper from his wallet. On it was written: “I speak only Czech.” We laughed and signed, and as we walked across to a seat where I could watch his bag he showed me the large scallop shell attached to his bag: “Santiago de Compostela” he said. I speak only Czech: it is a hell of a long way to Santiago from Paris.

On our visit to Chartres we saw the sign of the shell in front of the cathedral, and I think there were Camino pilgrims in the monastery-hotel. Were we pilgrims too? Perhaps in the way that Philip Larkin speaks of in his famous poem “Church Going” I could say that it “pleased me to stand in silence here” in that “serious house on serious earth”, recognising the hunger “to be more serious”. And in the gentle space of two days I did, I think, see some things more clearly.

The colour blue, or rather, all the colours of blue. I try to soak it in, to remember for later. And light, falling through the glass, sometimes sharply, sometimes softly, white, or glowing pink. Familiar Gospel stories told in pictures, considered, frame by frame, through the telescope of my camera. The four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, sitting on the shoulders of the prophets: interconnection, dependence. The angel that I’d photographed in 2006 still watching over the town from the green copper roof: fidelity, stability. Vespers with the Community of Chemin Neuf, their warm welcome, the hospitable liturgy. A song we know, the one we used for the blessing of St Bernard’s back home: Ubi Caritas et amor, Deus ibi est (Where charity and love are, God is there). I am singing “Alleluia!” in the cathedral that I first loved from a distance as an undergraduate history student at Sydney University more than thirty years ago. A feast of bread and duck paté shared in a park as the moon rises with my best and most patient friend. Two cranes circle the southern spire, consider the possibility of making their home here. The black sky etched against the cathedral’s soft gold stone. Sleeping in the light of a near full moon, watching it arc across the dome of the sky. The morning star.

And finally, there is an ordinary mass, with ordinary people, in the damp, quiet crypt, where we remember, with St Matthew, that we are les malades (the sick) and I am thankful, ever thankful, that Jesus says: “Je ne suis pas venu applier les justes, mais les pécheurs”, I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.