Reims and the Smiling Angel

 

Reims. Church of the unpronounceable name – and the smiling angel. L’ange au sourire.

Flat Matt and the angel

Two days after we heard the great knocks on the doors of Notre Dame on Palm Sunday, we took the train through more green-and-golden countryside to another Notre Dame, Notre Dame de Reims, and saw him, l'ange au sourire. He greets you as you enter, standing right there by the door. His is a smile of great sweetness, striking against the immensity of the place. 

The cathedral is enormous. It rises in weathered stone some 285 feet at its highest point, the angel on the bell tower; it is a vertiginous experience to look up at the towers against the scudding clouds. They seem to be falling, fast, right on top of you. 

The West Facade

                  The nave, looking west (actually south-west - the Cathedral is oriented 

south-west/north-east, along the axis of the summer solstice, perhaps a sign of its antiquity. There are traces of the original foundation ca 401 AD)

On our dizzying tower walk

The roof alone, reconstructed in concrete and metal after it burnt during the German bombardment in the first months of WWI, weighs (our guide said) some 1200 tonnes – 200 tonnes more than the roof of Notre Dame de Paris, our guide also told us (clearly a loyal son of Reims!). 

Inside the reconstructed roof over the apse.

Shell explosion 1914

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cath%C3%A9drale_Notre-Dame_de_Reims#/media/Fichier:Shell_Explosion_Cathedral_at_Rheims.jpg

Rodin loved this church; he found it beautiful. I found it massive, imposing, awe-inspiring...

...but not beautiful.

And then I saw the angel. He has stood there, under the cross of Christ, miraculously escaping fire and revolution and two world wars. The angel looks right down at you, and his face is bright with joy.

L'ange au sourire, far right

The angel stands under the crucifixion at the top of the tympanum (which did not escape the wars; what you see now on much of the great west façade is replica or reimagination of the church's 13th century statuary). 

As Jesus is crucified over his head the angel’s face is bright with joy. How is that possible? How is it that in the face of the cross, in the face of guillotine, bullets, two world wars that decimated the town (85% of it destroyed) and scarred the cathedral - how is it that in the face of all the bloodshed, God’s angel stands smiling upon me as I enter this church?

It is a question the cathedral poses to me, all the churches we have seen this spring, but especially this one, which greets me with bullet marks in its walls and a divine smile -- and with its founding saint, Saint Remi, carrying his own chopped-off head.

                          (There are a lot of these "cephalophore" saints in France. St Remi baptized Clovis, King of the Franks, at Reims ca. 501, thus making France Christian)

These cathedrals, like their saints, have stood through centuries of depredation and human conflict, many of them burnt down and rebuilt on the same holy ground many times.

On Good Friday David and I stopped on our way to Le Fief for a service in the little Eglise de la Chapelle Saint Mesmin, perched on the banks of the Loire.

The Chemins de Saint Jacques scallop shell 

Who, you might ask, was Saint Mesmin? He was in fact Saint Maximus, who in the 6^th century built a church there. The villagers were terrorized by a dragon that lived in the local cave; the villagers knew there was a dragon there because of the pestilential smell. So one night Maximus, or Mesmin, as the locals said it, rowed over to the cave with a candle and a prayer and drove out the dragon. So he became the church’s patron saint. That church, built in the 6^th century, was raided by Vikings in the 9th, burnt in the wars of religion, raided and burnt again, and every time it was rebuilt. There’s a little of the old Norman stone still visible, and a trail of faith that goes back 1500 years.  

Such persistence of faith! And it is not just the faith of bishops and saints and kings. It is the faith of thousands of ordinary people whose hands built these cathedrals. Our guide pointed out to us, on our tower walk, the comical and tragical and scary faces high up on the outside walls. 

These are the creations of local artisans, he said; the master architect let each artisan carve whatever face he liked here – where it could not much be seen, it is true, but the artisans did not let that stop them. These faces are wonderful, full of character, each one stamping a little of the artisan’s spirit on the great cathedral. These faces endure, and where they do not, where guns and shells have shattered them – you can see shrapnel gouges in the walls up there – others have laboured to recreate the same faces in the same stone because the work of these artisans mattered, their hands mattered; the lives of these long-gone ordinary people were precious and shall stand. That is what the old carved faces on these cathedrals say to us. 

And that is something of what Jesus says to us too, in Holy Week, on the cross.

The smiling angel at the door of Reims cathedral stands under the cross. You see both things together, the death and grief, and the smile in the face of God. “Peace be with you,” the risen Jesus says to his disciples that first Easter, the nail-marks fresh in his hands. Peace be with you, the smiling angel says to us, as we enter under the cross.

Nearby, another angel stands. This angel smiles more soberly, but still he smiles, and tilts his head toward the smiling angel. On his face there is a wound from the wars. They have left it there, the wound in the angel’s face, because (the cathedral literature says) it tells the church’s story. There is the wound in the angelic face, in the hands of the son of God. And there is the angelic smile. Both stand. Both are true.

We came back, later, after lunch under the cherry blossoms in the church’s garden, 

(This time David put all the tourists in the crypt) 

and a peek at the Art Deco library next door (funded by Andrew Carnegie, as the cathedral roof was funded by Rockefeller. There is a plaque recognizing Rockefeller's gift...up in the nether regions of the roof where, like the faces carved by the artisans, it is seen by very few!)

As we came back, I looked at the angel again, and this time I saw not just his sweetness, but his glee. He looks like he’s inviting you to shout, or dance, or kick up your heels, or laugh out loud. 

(Is that a fist-pump?)

Glee written in stone! How is it possible? The glee of faith in a stone angel’s face, here under the cross, here in Eastertide. Beautiful Reims!

Happy Easter!