“It was the steeple (of Saint-Hilaire) that gave all the occupations, all the hours, all the viewpoints of the town their shape, their crown, their consecration”
Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
“Those country churches were places of order and decorum; to breathe their bottled faith was to internalize an age-old stillness and completion, to stand for a moment inside a community and in reach of its past. They existed, as Proust wrote of the church of St Hilaire in Combray, in a four-dimensional space of their own. Standing in them, you also stood in Time. Villagers had for centuries been welcomed here by baptism, and had passed from here to their graves. In this sacred space people had raised their collective eyes to heaven. And those in trouble - the bereaved, the betrayed, the afflicted - had found their daily comfort in a sacrament that opened on eternity, and so made suffering holy and forgiveness sweet.”
Roger Scruton: ‘Stealing from Churches’, Chapter 5 of ‘Gentle Regrets’
“Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.”
Leonard Cohen: ‘Anthem’
“You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community liveable again”
Isaiah 58:12, ‘The Message’ translation
A candle is a non-conformist. It says to the darkness
“I beg to differ”.
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