Chartres

Have you ever thought of what life would be like if we all lived as medieval European peasants instead of as present-day professional or retired whatevers?

No electricity, so it is dark and cold.

No running water, so we seldom if ever wash.

No toilet, so yuck . . . and everyone is often sick.

No paved roads, so we squelch through mud.

No building contractors, so our homes are hovels.

We never travel beyond our shire. We can’t read. Some of our infants and children die. People of all ages die, all the time, in an era when tooth decay and appendicitis can be fatal. And, they die messy and noisy in an era before drugs.

And talk about hard work. We grow our food without the benefit of hoses or composters or tractors, or we perish.

You know the aphorism, “Life is short and brutal, and then you die?” That is us eight hundred years ago.

Crude. We are crude.

And then one day we walked to Chartres to see there the new cathedral and to touch there the sacred garment that Mary wore at the birth of Jesus.

Living now as we do in an age when we make our pilgrimages to Disney World or Florence or The Iowa State Fair, it takes a power of imagination to get what la Cathedrale de Notre Dame a Chartres meant to those who went there then. Surrounded by open farmland for kilometers in every direction and situated on a hilltop as it is, the cathedral rises out of its surroundings like a miracle at sea. If you have ever driven westward across eastern Colorado and suddenly witnessed the Rocky Mountains at one gasp you know the feeling.

They built the Cathedral at Chartres between 1194 and 1250 — 56 years, a mere jiffy in the cathedral construction game. By contrast, Notre Dame de Paris came in at 97 years and the Cathedral at Rouen at 200. So Chartres Cathedral was built of a piece, according to plan. Its lofty vaulted spaces, brilliant stained glass, sunlit galleries, and statuary fit together in an integrated, radiant, lofty, magnificent, humbling whole.

Here the church offered access to God. I imagine that starting from the moment when we rude peasants first beheld the hilltop silhouette, and as we entered its vaulted radiant chamber of unimagined height, and until we fell to our knees in prayer nothing could have been more apparent to us than that God dwelt here.

We visited Chartres the other day as part of our stay in nearby Dreux at the home of Andi and Colette Welti, friends we made on Skiathos in 1981. Never underestimate the connection-maintaining power of Christmas letters.

Chartres, the cathedral

Chartres, the town

Old friends