The old, red-brick church
Was framed in wood,
Its high, arched roof supported
by a webwork of shaped timbers.
Days before Christmas in 1952,
Some electrical misfire in the old walls
Sparked an inferno that
Devoured it in a
Single, red-hued, ember-filled night.
Parishioners arriving for evening Mass
Stopped wide-eyed from the cold, dark streets,
Many weeping openly at the sight.
By 1954, the old church’s brick
Was carted off and dumped
On church land where
Future Scouts would
have their sleep interrupted
By the corner of a block
Digging into the soft flesh
Of their young backs.
The building’s replacement,
Of the flameproof blonde brick
Preferred by Catholic bishops of the era
For churches, rectories and schools,
Had risen in place of the old.
But funds were short
And the stained glass
That kept out snow in l’hiver
And les maringuins
in the humid dusks of l’été,
Was a wavy and uniform lemon yellow—
Uninspiring, but cheap.
In 1960, as the country perched
on the edge of the Space Age,
with Russian steel moons
crisscrossing our anxious skies—
And the new Pope’s big council had yet
To jolt us out of religious torpor
By stripping
The painted statues from our walls
The Latin from our lips,
And the certainty of God’s favor
from our world view,
Père Verrette, an old combatant
In the town’s long-settled
But still smoldering
internecine ethnic battles,
Had amassed enough funds
Or nerve
To replace the old lemonade glass.
God knows how he found
the Florentine artist—
Perhaps
As in miracle tales of old,
an itinerant craftsman—
A Saint Joseph in disguise—
Wandered by,
With a wooden toolbox,
leather apron
And a cartload of lead caming*,
To design, cut and assemble the glass
In a single night,
Disappearing,
Nameless and uncompensated,
Into the winter mists.
But that’s the view of a
Navel-gazing four-year-old boy.
The process took
Months of planning,
Persuading (or dictating),
Fundraising,
And many months of gradual installation,
Until, like the blinding scales that dropped from
Saul’s newly-converted eyes,
The brooding boy looked up to see
The windows fully and
instantaneously transformed—
As though by divine fiat.
There was no miracle.
And yet, by some
wondrous and unexplainable happenstance,
This artist possessed the
Rare and otherworldly skill
To amalgamate
The fusty prayer card sensibilities of
the fastidious nuns
With the swinging, Space Age abstractions
of the present day —
Queen Victoria’s mourning garb
by way of Saville Row’s groovy threads;
A nun’s stern, concealing black habit
Assembled from a neon mix of
hot pink, gold and teal pieces.
The citrus glass came down,
And in swooped
A variegated blaze of
Sharp angles
Spiky shards,
The full spectrum of sanctity,
Split into a
Painter’s fan of bold hues
by the prism of grace and art—
The holy —
Refracted,
Dazzling,
Unpredictable —
Rendered near impossible
To tear one‘s gaze away from.
Every “verrière” was of a French
Hero, equitably split between
Saint and Sainte with an “E”
All clad in la peau blanche,
white-skin,
Except good Martin de Porres
Enslaved and Peruvian,
Black face rendered in blue
Tucked into the sacristy,
Masked by the pre-dawn dimness
Where altar boys vested
For six o’clock morning Mass.
The large main windows were
Reserved for the
Better known saints,
As long as Gaulish blood
ran through their veins
And nourished their hearts,
Or some Frankish connection,
However tenuous,
Linked them to our tribe.
Jeanne D’Arc--
La Pucelle, the Maid of Orléans,
With her streaming banner,
The Oriflamme,
And crowned the cringing Dauphin
Scattering soldiers of les Anglais;
perhaps an unsubtle goad
To the new, tolerant generation.
Saint Louis, King of France and
Namesake of that
gateway city in Missouri,
Medieval roi who
Banned trial by ordeal (good)
But burned a Talmud (bad)
On his way to winning a seat
In Heaven’s crowded bleachers.
Vincent de Paul—
Perpetually smiling,
Blue black cloak billowing
Back hunched toward the lowly,
Shelterer of orphans
And the desperate poor,
Sponsor of clothing collection bins;
Catherine Labouré—
Marian visionary
In her Flying Nun headgear,
Who bequeathed us the
Miraculous Medal
Stamped by the millions
into tin
And draped around the necks of
Countless Catholics
Or tucked safely
(Thank you for the cool confirmation gift,
Mononc’ and Matante!)
Into as many sock drawers.
The choir loft windows
Sadly blocked by the pipe organ,
Lit only by the rarely seen dawn sun,
Were perhaps the most magnificent,
Compressing into six tall panels
The life of our beloved Virgin Mother—
From Gabriel’s call
And Christmas joy
Through cradling her lifeblood-drained,
Olive-hued son,
To her crowning and exaltation
Au ciel, where perhaps we might
la voir un jour,
As the balcony singer
Insisted at funerals.
Soaring high above the center crossing,
where the long nave
Intersected the transept,
Were our illustrated histories—
The heros and heroines
We were not taught in school
(Did the nuns think we already knew?)
But that
Mon Père
Believed we ought to.
To the south,
The left as we processed to
the Communion rail,
the great explorers and founders:
Samuel de Champlain, who established
the first European toehold in Québec
And with guile and charm
kept the natives from
Slaughtering his anxious garrison.
Jacques Cartier, our Columbus,
Who sailed to New France,
Was first down the
Mighty Fleuve Saint-Laurent
and claimed it
And all surrounding lands
for the king,
The First Nations Peoples
Not being deemed
Worthy of consultation.
Marguerite Bourgeois,
An early Canadian settler
Who chaperoned and married off
Les Filles du Roi,
The King’s Daughters,
Orphan girls sent to New France to
Mate with the lonely men settlers
And increase the colony’s numbers;
Dollard des Ormeaux,
Grim, a face the green of envy,
Clutching a sword in one hand,
And Iroquois arrows
(Plucked ninja-like from the air?)
ready to fly into action
To slaughter les sauvages
(though unknown to us,
he blew himself up
with a barrel of gunpowder instead.)
Un martyre pour la foi.
Frère Andre, 19th century healer,
Whose excised heart
was on display in Montréal—
If you were interested in
that sort of thing.
I saw it once
In its brass reliquary,
On a side trip during Expo 67,
Seeming more a
Medical curiosity
Than a goad to faith.
Presiding over them all,
The red-cloaked
Francis-Xavier de Montmorency-Laval,
Bishop Laval,
Hand raised in episcopal blessing
First bishop of Quebec,
Who donated his fortune
To pay the unruly colony’s priests,
Founded a seminary for both
White and Huron candidates
And worked like the devil
to stop the sale of alcohol
to the natives.
My ancestor built him a windmill.
In the North window,
The Canadian martyrs—
Jesuits and others,
Who dove deep into
The 17th century Canadian wilds,
driven by religious fervor
And a self-abnegating mania
To convert the heathens,
Their immortal souls enchained by the Devil,
Thus freeing them for Heaven’s bliss.
Jean de Brébeuf,
Jacques Marquette
René Goupil,
Who found so many fiendish
Ways to die for the faith—
burned, shot with bullets and arrows
Tortured, tomahawked.
Especially overeager Isaac Jogues,
shown holding the
Chalice of Christ’s blood
with the stumps of fingers,
courtesy of Iroquois torment
on one transatlantic sojourn,
who met death on the next.
And a lone woman—
Kateri Tekakwitha,
The Lily of the Mohawk,
A native girl entranced
By Jesuit stories and rites,
Who strewed wooden crosses in the
Northern forests
That she might come upon them
in her journeying.
Not martyred,
But chaste and dying young—
To many,
A sure sign of sanctity.
Among this welter of
Gallic and Franco achievements,
One window stood out:
It’s main figure
Was not French,
And not Canadian —
Saint Jean Baptiste,
John the Baptist—
He who baptized Our Lord
in the Jordan
Before there was
A France or Canada.
Yet Mon Père knew,
Even if his incurious
Parishioners did not,
The significance of his presence:
As patron of Québec (aha!)
He was the heavenly protector
Of every child of La Belle Province,
Including the wayward
children of the parish
Who were at that moment
forgetting their French
As quickly as they learned
The names of
The Mercury Seven
Or the castaways
On Gilligan’s Island.
Les nouvelles verrières,
The new stained-glass windows,
Were endlessly captivating
Their ray-like explosions of
Flying daggers of stabbing color
Took us into a new world of
Ecstatic imagination
Faith clothed in
Modern fabric:
Spandex sarongs
Polyester petticoats
Kevlar kimonos
Neoprene knickers—
The saints liberated from
Watercolor, gold-haloed banality
And flung into
Technicolor sparkle
That made them palatable
To young minds
Steeped in
Color TV,
Painted Laugh-In dancers,
Bazooka Joe,
Tony the Tiger,
Popeye,
Dick Tracy
And Batman comic books
by the armload.
Mon Père has passed on
To a world where
Time, color, texture and flavor
Have no worth.
French Masses —
Actually any Masses —
are no longer
celebrated at Saint Georges,
The building having been sold
to pay for lay indifference
And clerical depravity,
Passing through hands of
Dubious or no sanctity.
The verrières remain,
For now,
A darksome testament to
A history little known
Even to the people
Who worshipped there.
When visitors pass through
And gaze up at the
riot of colors, shapes and
Strange personages,
Are their flaccid spirits
Still piqued?
Are their artistic heartstrings
Plucked or rung?
Or do they simply see
Pretty pictures,
Emptied of meaning
By a world that has moved on?
Verrière(s): Stained glass window(s)
L’hiver: winter
L’été: Summer
Combatant: combatant, warrior
Maringuin: Mosquito, the québécois version of Moustique
Mon Père: "Literally, “my father” — a form of address for a parish priest
Saint: Title for a male saint
Sainte: Title for a female saint
La peau blanche: white skin
Les Anglais: The English
Roi: king
Mononc’, Matane: Uncle, Aunt
Ciel: Heaven
La voir un jour: See her (the Blessed Virgin) one day — line from a song popular at funerals
Fleuve Saint-Laurent: The Saint Laurence River
les sauvages: literally, savages — indigenous people of the First Nations
Un martyre pour la foi: A martyr for the faith
La Belle Province: The Beautiful Province, motto of the province of Québec
*Caming is the name for the H-shaped cross-section lead strips that hold the pieces of glass in place.
Thanks for the tour. Sad end.