tekakwitha.

view of montreal looking south, taken 1930

having just spent an astoundingly great weekend visiting one of my best  friends, i have montreal, specifically french catholics, on the brain. walking home after a particularly long night we made our way up to my friend's studio on one of the top floors of a building and lorded over the montreal skyline. what strikes one the most is how from the ground level you can't really conceive of the way in which churches in a city are built to loom over those oblivious below. they rose up with such grandiosity and authority, it felt my self taken aback by all i had been missing. as a person who doesn't practice any sort of religion, i felt oddly sad for them, sitting in plain sight yet seemingly unnoticed and almost neglected, some sort of beacon of a time lost.

montreal, 1875

the simple feat of building the dome on the basilica style roman catholic churches seems catastrophically impossible to me. specifically when considering how the largest churches in montreal were built as early as the mid-nineteenth century. with a series of pulleys and scaffolding they were painstakingly built over years, sometimes decades. having studied renaissance and baroque architecture, the sheer dedication of the patrons, architects and labourers leaves me awestruck.

bishop ignace bourget of montreal, taken 1862

i was particularly aware of the religious qualities of french canada this past weekend due to my concurrent reading of leonard cohen's beautiful losers. written in the late sixties, cohen's distinctly post-modern work encapsulates the dichotomies of religions in contemporary culture. aggressively sexual, almost obscene, the stream of consciousness narrative surrounds a love triangle between a man, his dead wife, and a fictitious character named f. with the ever looming figure of the indigenous saint catherine tekakwitha, whom the narrator, an academic, studies almost obsessively. recently having been exposed to the rich literary history of french canada i am consistently shocked at how little we pay credence to our own historical legitimacy as a nation. persistently relying on america as an easy scapegoat for a national persona, we neglect our own unique qualities as a people mediating between the two worlds of french and english, not to mention the plethora of other languages indigenous and imported to us. in some strange way i feel as though as long as we don't speak too loud or too boastfully about who we are as a country, the longer we will remain unnoticed and unfrenzied. canada has always held an innately pure quality in my mind, but it may just be wishful thinking.

depiction of catherine tekakwitha