anglomedved

Yesterday I got out into the Belgian countryside, the first time for several months, retracing a walk I had done done last Christmas, to the small town of Chièvres, 70 km south-east of Brussels.

Ath-Blaton canal: bridge with lock behind

For most of the way there and back I walked down the Ath-Blaton canal. Just before World War I, it carried nearly a million tons of coal a year from the mines in SW Belgium, but is now used only, and very occasionally, by pleasure boats. Canals are good places to walk down, generally pretty quiet, a little cooler in hot weather – it was hot, you could smell the tar on the roads. Everywhere was very green, an unusually hard winter and with plenty of rain since means that everything has grown luxuriantly.

Chièvres was cleary an important place in the Middle Ages, with two medieval chapels in addition the 16th century late Gothic Church. There is also a chapel to our Lady of the Fountain, on the site of a miraculous spring. The building was destroyed at the French Revolution and rebuilt, as an inscription tells us, ‘by the piety of the faithful, stimulated by the zeal of Abbé Lambert…’ I rather wish they had not. It is a pretty hideous place, with the worse pietà I have seen to date and some disastrous 1950s stained glass, not dissimilar to that which disfigures the main church, which is otherwise a delightful building with a lovely sense of space.

 

St Martin's church at Chièvres

From there I went on to the Marian basilica at Tongre-Sainte-Marie, a rather nice 18th century building built to hold a miraculous statue of the virgin which appeared in the 12th century. The inside is late, refurnished in the mid-19th century. The carving is not as good as pre-French revolution work, and the woodwork bears signs of mechanical sawing and moulding, but it is decent, and has a sense of unity about it. The church felt prayed in.

  
 
 The basilica at Tongre-Notre-Dame

If you have a sense of history and architecture, walking in Belgium, especially the south, is an open history book. Until the French Revolution much of the land was owned by half a dozen big abbeys, nearly all of which have disappeared, or by wealthy farmers, whose large farms, built around a courtyard and barricadable against vagrants and thieves, have remained. With the industrial revolution came railways and brickworks and lots of construction until the interbellum depression – some of it quite showy in a rather peasant sort of way. The Church also built heavily in this period, especially schools, mainly staffed by nuns.

A typical late 19th century church school. Almost certainly run by a women's community.

The 60s brought expanding suburbs with their rows of small detached houses, often in hideous red brick and with cheap stained glass windows, followed by bungalows with large bay windows affording a view onto large mock Chinese vases and the heavy oak furniture that was popular in the 1970s. The first oil shock and a free-falling Wallonian economy fortunately put a stop to them. Residential building on a larger scale restarted about 10 years ago, much of it of good aesthetic standards.

The abbey at Male

It rained and it rained and it rained. Rarely hard, but incessantly. I had decided on a day's walk in the country, so had dropped off MmeKordukova with the good camera in Bruges, Belgium's number one tourist city, then driven out of the city and parked the car at the Abbey of Male at the edge of the suburbs. Attractive building, but a bit awesome for a women’s convent. More like a castle. I slipped inside into the chapel, and out again very quickly – all in that soul-destroying ‘stripped bare concrete’ style of the two post-Vatican II decades.

The six kilometres to Damme, my destination, became eight because a farmer had put up a ‘Privaat domein’ notice across the shortest route. So I skirted a very long way round. This took me past a large church by Jean de Béthune, the leading neo-Gothic architect, way too large for the tiny village of Vijvekapelle in which it is situated, flanked on the one side by the neo-Gothic buildings of a girl’s school (originally run of course by nuns) and on the other side by the neo-Gothic buildings of a boy’s school (originally run of course by brothers). Needless to say the nuns and brothers are long gone, and the church itself has only two masses a month. But both the church and the school buildings kept in good repair, as a matter of civic pride.                                                                                                                                                   


    
  Damme church outside                                                                                                      Damme church inside

Eventually I arrived at Damme. This used to be the port for Bruges, with a bustling wealthy community, which built a large brick church to match those of Bruges itself. Then the port silted up and Damme, like Bruges itself, entered several centuries of slumber. Much of the town disappeared. The church became too big and was partly demolished. What is left is rather attractive both inside and out. Several artefacts inside, beautifully preserved and cared for, show why Belgium used to be justly famous for the quality of its church fittings, even if it feels more like a free museum than a place of prayer. Mass is said there just once a month.

A Roman Catholic priest friend of ours joined us for supper last night. He spoke of a frequent phenomenon he encounters in Belgium: of Catholics who maintain a deep spiritual life (prayer, bible…) but with relatively little interface with the organized church, with which they feel uncomfortable and unable to connect. Is this a specifically Roman Catholic phenomenon….?

It was a dreadful meeting at the big religious bookstore at the end of the tramline. A solid phalanx of the Brussels bourgeoisie, average age close to 70, mostly retired on good pensions, listening to a popular writer on the position of the Roman Catholic church. There were some good ideas for the future, some of which the Orthodox Church could usefully hear. But it was shallow, much about organization, little spiritual depth, no sense of real spiritual battle.

Very Belgian. Belgium is essentially a country created by the bourgeoisie for the bourgeoisie. This meeting showed the bourgeoisie wanting to do with the Church what they did with the monarchy: cut it down to their size and fit it to their horizon.

I am pretty tolerant with Roman Catholicism – it is after all the traditional Christian confession in Belgium – but this evening it was definitely not at its best (more accurately: this was not the most appealing of the many sub-groups of which Roman Catholicism is made up). I left very fast after the meeting.

Yesterday’s annual Easter Monday liturgy of all the clergy of the Brussels diocese around Archbishop Simon was a relaxed and really quite pleasant affair. We kept a full archiepiscopal liturgy on the road without mishap, and some imported seminarians from Moscow made it sound very ‘cathedral’.

We were about thirty in the sanctuary, nearly the full Belgian clergy complement of 20, plus guests and acolytes. We are probably a much more varied group than you would get in a similar setting in Russia. Those of us who have been ordained here (all the deacons and half of the priests) have often long stories as to how we or our families ended up in Brussels. ‘Conducting’ the liturgy was the senior proto-deacon, Fr Alexander, whose 60^th birthday we celebrated afterwards. He was the last of the deacons to be trained by Bishop Basil Krivocheine, and has trained all the new generation, including myself. Competent, unassuming and patient – very patient at times, particularly with those to whom liturgy comes less naturally.

Also in the sanctuary, in stikarion, was our Polish priest’s mentally handicapped son, a short clipped beard telling me he was now adult. Like much of our large Polish contingent his father is a builder by trade, and while I would not put him on a seminary examining board, watching him confess people during the liturgy it was clear he provides that sympathetic and compassionate listening that is so important in exile communities. It was absolutely right that his son be with us. Sadder was the state of Father X, who looks like he’s on the way out and I’m not sure he’ll be around next year.

Belgium is not the highest visibility ROC diocese in Western Europe. But yesterday’s liturgy is suggesting that we might be developing a certain common spiritual style. It’s a curious mixture of personal discipline and tolerance, and a merciful lack of personal ecclesiastical ambition. Good liturgy is important to us. It’s still Russian yes, but softer and less brash than what I know from Moscow or St Petersburg. Perhaps because most of us have ‘been through the mill’ in one way or another, enough to keep us relatively humble. Interestingly, many of us are regular visitors to Athos. This may just be pointing to something…

This notice caught my eye in the Beguinage church in Mechelen (30 km north of Brussels) the other week.

It describes the indulgences attached to certain prayers said at certain times in front of a Mission Cross. Mission Crosses used to be set up to record a mission preached in a parish, normally by a preaching order like the Redemptorist or Passionist fathers. The Redemptorists, whose mission in 1882 this notice records, had a reputation as hell-fire preachers, and drew large crowds in the days before radio, television and the cinema. Most of the crosses themselves were temporary affairs, and have long disappeared.

As a good Protestant boy fifty years ago, I was taught that indulgences were a bad Catholic invention, which Luther rightly condemned, leading to the Reformation.  

And while I may, as an Orthodox today, find purgatory and indulgences to be rather mechanical ways of putting across the need for serious purification in order to come into God's presence, and while they went out of fashion with Vatican II, one nevertheless senses an honest piety:

“Indulgence of three hundred days whenever piously and with a penitent heart, one prays five times Our Father, five times Hail Maries and five times Glory be, in honour of Christ's five wounds, in front of the Mission Cross”, or again:

"To enjoy a full indulgence one must first go to confession, take communion and visit the Mission Cross in a church or public chapel and pray there for the intentions of His Holiness (the Pope).”

Can one really argue with that?

More from last Sunday’s visit to Leuven.

This lovely old medieval church near the centre of Leuven has been mothballed since 1968 – in other words, closed to the public and given just enough attention – keeping the roofs intact against rain and the doors against tramps ­– so as to be reusable at same unspecified time in the future.

Later I found this touching plaque near the main hospital, "in thankful memory of the Hospital Sisters, who between 1184 and 1999 took responsibility for the sick and travellers", that is until they shut for lack of vocations.

Why the closed church, the death of the nursing community? The reasons are many and complex. But one of the biggest and simplest is, very prosaically, contraception.

Without it, the norm in a Catholic family was between four and six kids. And in a reasonable pious household, you could expect at least one, if not two, to go into the Church as a celibate priest or nun, often abroad, in Belgium’s African colonies or to South America. Add to this infant mortality and the odd war, it kept the population kept pretty constant without condoms or the pill. 

I’m not saying the level of piety or education was that high. In particular among the women’s communities it could be pretty basic, the more so because, with a shortage of men after World War I, for a woman to enter a convent was often the only socially acceptable alternative to being 'left on the shelf'. And for working class boys, too, seminary was often the only way to get a decent education.

And if you have six kids, and not much else to do on a Sunday morning, it does not take many families to fill a church building.

Much was wrong with this Western European Catholicism - the dying days of which I remember as a teenager in the 1960s -, but there remains a regret for certain things that were good in it: especially a sense of decency, intact families, and an understanding that there were other things more important in life than wealth or pleasure.

25 kilometres south-west of Brussels

I didn’t want to continue that conversation yesterday on ЖЖ. It was sunny and still hot. It was my last chance to go walking in the country before leaving for Russia next Friday. But my wife asked me to, so OK... The conversation was about vocation. I was not in the mood, but did my best

I still went off into the country. Driving out of Brussels, all of a sudden I was struck between the eyes by what is possibly the best explanation yet of why the good Lord had let me be thrown out of a monastery 25 years before.

I entered a French Benedictine monastery in my early 30s, believing I had a vocation to the monastic life, with the priesthood thrown in.  All went fine for the first year, then it all unravelled and I was asked a year later by the novice master (a man I felt I could not trust at a deep, spiritual level),  to leave. As he was expected to become the next abbot, it was no use protesting. (He left two years later, just after I got married, after getting too close to the abbess of the women's monastery next door).

Leaving the monastery was worse than a divorce (which I have also been through). The bitterness took a long time to get out of my system. The 'why Lord?' question remained for years...

12-century ‘sedes sapientiae’ at Ittre

What suddenly struck me yesterday was that, very simply, if I had stayed at that particular monastery I would not have been be tested enough. I would be better tested ‘in the world’. In the words of the Epistle to St Peter in the 1960 New English Bible (theologically wayward at times but brilliant as a translation): ‘This is cause for great joy, even though now you smart for a little while, if need be, under trials of many kinds. Even gold passes through the assayer's fire, and more precious than perishable gold is faith which has stood the test’.

I hope that this is not prelest, but simply the assayer’s fire in that monastery (and IMHO in most Benedictine monasteries of the time) was not hot enough.

It was unseasonably warm this Sunday afternoon. It would have been a sin to stay indoors, even for Live Journal dialogues. So I drove out into the country north-east of the old university city of Leuven and then went walking. My route took me past some of Belgium’s only vineyards. The grapes were small but tasty.

 I looked into the local village church at Houwaart. Inevitably it was locked. I started talking to an old woman outside the church in Dutch (the language of northern Belgium). She couldn’t place my accent and asked me whether I was from Holland. No, I said, I'm from England. And she pointed me to some English war graves.

 The English war graves of both the first and second world wars are of identical pattern, in England, in France, in Belgium. And they are all very well looked after.  When you see a group of three or four gravestones together in a Belgium graveyard, you can be almost sure that it is an airplane that came down, probably on a bombing raid to Germany.

 I always get a lump in my throat when I see war graves. I don’t know why: I have lived outside England all my adult life and tend to steer clear of English circles here. I guess it something instinctive, deep inside. Perhaps also I am now part of the older generation, that is of the generation which keeps the memories of any people. What is frightening is just how young these men were. The pilot of one of the two planes which came down at Houwaart was just 19 (my own sons are 20 and 18). At 19 I could not yet drive a car, let alone fly an airplane. But it is right that we keep the memory and the graves tidy. Requiescant in pace.

The presence of a large Muslim population has hit the headlines with the open-air pray-in in Moscow last weekend.  

If I can throw in some ideas from our European, and particularly Belgian experience.  For information, right now Brussels has a 15-20% Muslim population, and more than 30% at primary school level. The big migration was in the 60s and 70s, mainly from French-speaking North Africa.

 I would want to make a clear distinction between a) the role of the government and b) the role of the church and the individual adult Christian.

 The government’s role is to provide the basics of order. Very much on the basis of the very sinful state where we find ourselves. In Moscow itt has two groups, one of Muslims who are (if I have got it right), largely male, largely young, relatively uneducated and uncultured. The second group is Russian, male and female, all ages, all educational levels. The two have to remain in sufficient harmony that both sides feel reasonably safe in each others' presence. That if you find yourself as a white Russian in a metro car with ten Muslims, you feel safe, and vice versa. And I think not much more.

 On the Christian side, yes, as some have said, there is the welcome to the stranger. I would, however, point to what seems to me to be a fundamental ambiguity in the approach of the Russian church hierarchy: on the one hand courting the Muslims en bloc as 'upholders of traditional order and morality', on the other hand there is the simple fact that we still believe that Islam is an inferior faith and that a Muslim will profit from becoming Christian. Look with the love of Christ in the faces, one by one, of the Muslim men on their carpets outdoors last weekend in Moscow, and what do you say? Do you leave them on their carpets? Was the late Fr Daniel Sisoes a martyr or a political embarrassment? Or do we quietly leave evangelization of Muslims to the Protestants (whose house church method may indeed be more suited).

Could someone answer me one question: are these young men in Moscow alone or with their families? This is the key question. Our practical experience in Belgium is that once Muslims bring their families into the host country, the situation changes rapidly, especially as their birth rate is about twice ours. The maths is simple. 10 Muslims, 90 Russians in this generation, Muslim 4 children per family, Russian 1.5. In two generations time, the ratio is 40 Muslims to 51 Russians.  At this stage the real hard question hits: what civilization do you teach them in school? As Nicolas Bardos, the former professor of gepolitics at the university of Louvain-la-Neuve told me recently: population is just about the most decisive political argument there is.

 As a Christian, I think we have to keep these two approaches in tension. The curse of Christianity in my adopted country (Belgium) is not having the guts to look the first one in the eyes and to accept the fact that politics is dealing with sinful man. If you don't accept that politics is dealing with sinful man, politics gets left to sinful men.