Most Sundays we go to our little church.
There is another church, the big church, which we go to sometimes, but we prefer this small one.
By small, perhaps you are imagining something along the lines of a modest chapel, for twenty or thirty people. But it is smaller than that. Tiny. If you imagine a space that will hold twelve parishoners at the most, then you are right in the picture.
From the moment I first stepped inside three years ago, I was struck by the imaginary thought that I had entered an early Christian church, one from the very beginning, from the first century. Of course this church cannot really be that old, as Christianity was a long way from the shores of Normandy in Christ's century. But that is how it felt when I stepped inside.
There are no light fixtures, only candles. The icons glint and flutter in the dark. The giltwood frames alternately glow and disappear.
The walls are natural and pure, exactly as they would have been in Christ's time. The exposed stone is pointed with limestone, not cement. In the limestone joints there is character and age; cement does not age, it just gets dirty. So these joints, I imagined them to have been absorbing incense for 2,000 years, and the character of the nooks and crannies bore witness to this.
One wall is not exposed stone, but is covered in an earth render, a practice common in rural buildings here. I could see the craftsmen, imagining them in tunics and sandals, rubbing the walls smooth, then taking up horsehair brushes to coat the wall with a limewash finish, in a pale golden yellow that has lasted to this day, although today it has more character than it did the day they laid it on.
The ceiling is held up with twisted beams of oak, and the floor is an ancient terra cotta, where the tiles are set extremely tight, as tight as they will go, with hardly any joint at all, which is the way you can tell that it is really old, and done right. That is the way they did it back then, whereas today they have forgotten this, and set the tiles down with really wide joints, which makes the floor rigid and mathematical, instead of natural and old.
When Pere Jacques speaks, he need not speak very loud, as we can hear him really well, standing right in front of him as we are. So, he speaks softly, like you do when you don't want people outside to hear you. Which is like it must have been for churches in the first century. They had to have their mass in secret, as their life hung in the balance, that is how much they believed.
Sometimes, when Pere Jacques reads directly from Scripture, like the Epistles, I am sure that Paul is speaking directly to me, with no go-between, and so he does not have to speak loud at all, since I can reach out and put my hand on his shoulder if I wanted to, but that would be disrespectful while he is speaking, so I listen intently instead.
When the ladies sing the hymns -- and their voices are lovely in that tiny space, especially Natalya's which was a real surprise for me the first time I heard her sing in church, and I felt honored to have married her at that moment, someone with such a lovely voice -- it is like they are singing for all of us, and that it really, really matters what we are doing, since it could be taken away from us at any time, and we want to make absolutely certain that we let Christ know how much we love him and want to be like him.
