Church of Our Lady

Church of Our Lady, located in Brugges, Brussels is the most overwhelming and atmospheric structure I have ever set foot in. Few places even compare. I sit her, in chairs laid out so that people may come and sit and feel properly overwhelmed. I sit here and I write of my travels.

The sign at the door reads “please be silent” and though there are many people here, they make very little sound. The most significant sound here flows from behind the alter, melodic chanting latin tunes.

But this is the most of the atmosphere I think I possibly express. Madonna and the Child, a Michelangelo sculpture, lies here. I consider it one of the lesser grandiose wonders in this church. Paintings and sculptures larger than myself but no less detailed pepper the church in every pose. There is a wooden alter that spirals upwards to at least six times my own height, and ingrained in the wood are countless cherubs and other tiny detailed figures. This piece is my favorite, and after taking six pictures of it, I have resigned to the realization that I can never fully capture it.

Another portrayal of Madonna and the Child is wooden sculpture carved from the trunk of a tree, but only partially so. Thus it was clearly both a tree and a mother holding her child. Elsewhere, outside an isolated prayer room, a plaque reads “You, citizen of th town or pilgrim from far away looking for tranquility. Here you may become silent at the well of all beauty and life. No one is a stranger in this church, where God as loving father is waiting only for you.” I paid 50 pence to light a thin white candle amongst the many others. I have always loved symbolic gestures, such as that. I tried to re-light a burnt out candle, though I could not.

To be here is not serene nor is it tranquil, but powerful and immense. It overwhelms me in a dizzying manner, something that up until now I have felt only from powerful dreams.

To say that I have never been a religious man would be as heinous a lie as I could tell of myself. But that I have never followed a religion makes being here an odd experience for me. I wish only that I could hold onto this.

“The more I studied accounts both written and told, the more it seemed to me that we attempt such histories not to preserve knowledge, but to fix the past in a settled way. Like a flower pressed and dried, we try to hold it still and say ‘this is exactly as it was the first day I saw it.’ But like a flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses it’s fragrance and vitality, it’s fragility becomes brittleness, and it’s colors fade. And when you next look at the flower, you know that it is not what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever”.