In 1946, the story goes, Europe was bitter and broken. To symbolize the beginning of the time for healing, fourteen large wooden crosses were built, and carried from all corners of the continent to Vézelay, a lovely hilltop town and spiritual center in Burgundy. They came from Italy, Holland, Luxembourg, Portugal, and France itself, and are still on display on the walls of Vézelay’s cathedral. Some are marked with their origin, some with Latin prayers, and some appear entirely blank, but there is one that bears some extra explaining, so for that one there is a separate sign.
While this plan was being implemented, apparently, some German soldiers still imprisoned in France heard about it. They pleaded to be allowed to join the pilgrimage, and, following some rather startled deliberations that I can’t begin to imagine, a fifteenth cross was hastily built for them to carry. The prisoners brought their cross to Vézelay with the others, and there it remains to this day.
The cathedral feels like an extraordinarily holy place. Which sounds inherently redundant, but even among cathedrals this one stands out. The crosses are a part of it, certainly; they set a profoundly solemn tone. In the crypt, moreover, you’ll find the tomb and relics of Mary Magdalene.
Now.
This is what made Vézelay so important to begin with, but in the 1970′s another set–a body in a tomb and a patch of skin from a woman’s skull–were discovered in St.-Maximin-la-Ste.-Beaume, where we stayed in Provence, and that took a lot of the pilgrim traffic away from Vézelay. I could never presume to say which, if either or if not both, is the real thing, but I can say this: the crypt in St. Maximin is a dark, empty, airless place that I rushed out of as soon as I could decently do so. Vézelay’s somewhat larger crypt, on the other hand, felt like a good place to stay for a while. A number of women evidently agreed with me: they were sitting on benches, kneeling on the ground and, in one particularly moving case, bent with her forehead pressed to the cold stone floor.
We climbed quietly back up and began to make our way back to the front, but my attention was mostly on a pair of nuns who were tidying up after the morning’s mass. One of them was blowing out candles, and the arm of the candelabra was a bit too high for her. She took its candle down, snuffed the flame, and then tried to replace it, but it was above her sight-line and she had trouble steadying it. So this sweet-faced little nun in her light blue habit jumped up into the air, her socked-and-sandalled feet kicking out behind her as her back arched like a basketball player’s mid-dunk, and pressed the candle firmly onto its platform. When she landed her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed, and she spun around to see if the other nun had witnessed her daring little maneuver. The other woman’s back was turned, and I turned mine, too, quickly, in case a lay-person watching might embarrass her.
I see this propaganda from time to time in French churches about “the living Church,” and I always roll my eyes. But now I see these same rolling hills in 1946, and then the playful twist of the pink-cheeked nun’s lips, and I think that I finally understand what it is meant to mean.