Paris bulletin 9 2013

This time last year I wrote a bulletin about the church organs of Paris. There’s something about the month of December, the dark nights and the cold air – possibly even the advent of Christmas, although there’s little enough left of the ‘holy’ in the Christmases we celebrate now – that leads me back to churches, to their dim interiors, makes me want to fill my nose with the scents of incense and candle wax.

It’s the bells of Notre Dame I’m thinking of just now. These past seven weeks I’ve been hearing them every Wednesday evening as I come up from the RER metro and make my way across the parvis de Notre Dame and over to Shakespeare & Co, the bookshop in whose upstairs library a weekly writing workshop has been taking place.

First the great bell, Emmanuel the ‘bourdon’ bell, rings out a few seconds ahead of the rest and then the pealing begins and although the traffic noise is not drowned out, the bells rise above it, melodic and formidably insistent in the night air.

                                            

                                                      Emmanuel

Last week I was early for my class so, instead of just crossing the bridge I went round to the church entrance and seeing it was still open, went inside. Mass was being sung but few enough of the visitors were there to hear it. Perhaps thirty or so were standing with the priest, the rest were like me, tip-toeing about, unengaged in the central purpose of the building although probably not completely indifferent to the atmosphere of prayer and calm.

You can’t explore inside any of the Russian or Greek Orthodox churches as those tourists were exploring Notre Dame. The churches are locked except during the hours of formal worship. I know because I’ve tried them. Like mosques, they are spaces apart, sacred ground for their fidèles. I love the open accessibility of the Catholic churches but I also admire the insistence on the ‘awe-fulness’ of the divine that is implied by those shut doors with their notices in Greek, Aramaic or Russian that make no concessions to casual passers-by.

The first phase of the new Institut des Cultures d’Islam was completed a couple of weeks ago and the great and the good of Paris came to celebrate the opening of the new building on the rue Doudeauville. It is a splendid space on three floors, with a hamman in the basement which will open in January. I and several hundred others were lined up outside on the afternoon of Thursday 28 November, expecting to get in since we’d been invited. The main door is on the rue Stephenson. Within minutes the queue was overflowing onto the narrow street, blocking the traffic. The noise of angry drivers thumping their car horns rapidly became as deafening as it was pointless.

It was raining slightly and in the close-pressed crowd tempers began to rise. We waited and waited while the security men kept pushing us back. Tempers rose higher. An old man on my right leaning on a stick began berating a young woman with a child who was trying to wriggle her way forward to the front. Other people, just as hemmed in and uncomfortable, began cursing him for his intolerance. Considering the occasion, it was a bad beginning.

Then - quite how it happened I’m still not sure - all of a sudden I and 7 others were pulled forward and told we could go in, not to hear the speeches (which I didn’t care about anyway since they’d no doubt be as predictable as such speeches always are on these occasions) but to go straight upstairs to the first and second floors.

Thus it is that I can report that the first floor is wholly taken up by ‘la salle de prière’. A man was handing out elasticated blue plastic bags at the entrance so that people didn’t have to remove their shoes. What was there to see? A carpeted empty room, some lights hanging low, the mihrab in the corner and diagonally across the space, a curtain behind which the women worship – about one third of the whole area.  Nothing remarkable you might think, except that the fact that it is there at all is quite remarkable. The cultural centre has been funded by the Mairie de Paris so in theory there should be no religious activity within the building - the law of 1905 prohibits the state from funding buildings which will be used for religious purposes.  It has required money from la Grande Mosquée de Paris plus some careful manoeuvring on the part of Daniel Vaillant (mayor of the 18^th arrondissement) and Delanoe’s team in the town hall, to bring the secular and the holy together under one roof.

Interesting and challenging times we live in – perhaps no more so than any other time but noisier and more invasive in every way than they used to be. We may not want ‘les rituels du culte’ but truly we do need the silence of churches.