GAEN MURPHREE    writer

Sitting for two hours staring up at every single pane of Sainte-Chapelle’s Genesis window, I got so cold I started shivering. For real. Cold to the bone. What did a court lady do during a sure-to-be-bone-numbing hours-long December prayerfest in the 1250s? Did she combat hypothermia daily? (though likelier my forebears were out in the fields, far colder still, praying not to starve, and pulling turnips). Sooner or later, I could step out of this awe-inducing-yet-unheatable beauty and rejoin my own era—preferably someplace with 21st century HVAC. But how did they make it through the winter, those people from eight centuries ago? Sainte-Chapelle was consecrated in 1248—open for business to house Louis IX’s purchase-of-a-lifetime from Baldwin of Constantinople: the Crown of Thorns and a small piece of the True Cross, a purchase equal parts piety and power, the two being intertwined inseparably in that distant era. Truly: it cost more to buy the relics than to construct the chapel housing them, so this was no small purchase. This is all setting aside the questions of, How, in those medievally days, did they investigate and establish provenance? and, Did Louis ever wonder if he was being royally hoodwinked? Hoodwinked or no, at least one Crusades massacre took place over a so-called Piece of the True Cross: after the Siege of Acre Crusaders slit the throats of about 3,000 townspeople to make Saladin pony up. So, provenance proving or no, HolinessGodPower was serious business in the Middle Ages, and relics the sort of bitcoin of their day. They might be worth nothing or more than life itself. To house his prize, Louis built his Sainte-Chapelle, his “Holy-Chapel,” as a giant reliquary: a two-story, gold-and-fleur-de-lis-embossed gothic-stone-chapel-as-reliquary, flooded and pierced by jewel-colored light: the yellow of yellow diamonds, the green of emeralds, the purple of amethysts, the blue of sapphires, the red of rubies. Its fifteen bays plus rose window (five bays facing five bays in the nave, five in a semicircle in the apse, rose window on the western wall opposite the sanctuary end) house the most glorious stained glass ever created by human hand. IMHO. And the sleight of hand by which weight-bearing stone transmutes itself into soaring open space and glorious shafts of light still boggles and dazzles the mind. As one visitor in the early 14th century put it, to step inside Sainte-Chapelle is to “believe oneself, as if rapt to heaven, entering the chambers of Paradise.” It’s December 20. The 24th day of Advent. Five days till Christmas. Paris. Outside it’s a cold, gray day, with constant drizzle such that holding an umbrella is an exercise in futility. The drizzle goes everywhere. Seams. Skin. Glasses. Hair. Everywhere. Yet it’s also unseasonably warm—temperatures in the 50s, when they should be much colder. All this drizzle sans global warming could instead be a delightful dusting of snow? But it’s not. It’s just wet and miserable. Inside, I’m sitting in a regulation-issue metal folding chair, directly across from the Genesis window, staring up up up. The Genesis window is just that: the book of Genesis retold in glass. The artists begin the story in the bottom-most, left-most pane (we’ll call it pane 1), and the story moves left to right, four panes at a time, row by row in fourteen ascending rows, going bottom to top from pane 1 (left-most, bottom-most, row 1) to pane 56, the right-most pane in row 14, the tippy top. First of course is Creation—rows 1 and 2, panes 1 through 7—with earth, sky, water, plants, animals, us! being newly wrought by God, who’s depicted by the artists with a youthful, Jesus-y vibe: long brown hair, nicely trimmed beard, flowing robes, the works. By the end of row 2, humankind has already blown it, and Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise. By pane 10, they toil away: Eve spins and Adam delves, but at least they have a cute dog. Then at the end of that same row, Cain kills Abel and we see the blood running down Abel’s face. Nice start, humans! Violence. Conflict. Brother-on-brother head smashing. Definitely a theme. Definitely a recurring event here. (On a side note, Adam and Eve also famously delved and spun in the revolutionary jingle that helped power rabble rouser Wat Tyler’s eponymous rebellion in 1381: “When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?” So is the Adam and Eve snapshot an early sign of worker unrest? An early dream of a proletarian revolution yet to come?) A dove brings an olive branch to Noah and his floating ark of birds and animals in pane 19. We build the Tower of Babel in pane 23 and God tears it down. At the beginning of row 7, a very knight-straight-from-Crusades-looking Abraham on a galloping white horse smites an Elamite—definitely “Go Team Christendom” iconography, given that by 1248 those so-called “holy” wars had been going on 152 years spanning the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries and that no small part of Louis’s famed “piety” involved smiting. Nice try, dove! So much for the olive branch! Row 8 moves from Sodom and Gomorrah to Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac. Refresher: In a sort of tied-to-the-railroad-tracks “Perils of Pauline” nailbiter move, God bids Abraham sacrifice his son, then right when the knife is about to strike an angel stays his hand. This pane is a two-fer: in one half circle, Abraham and Isaac—who knows nothing about any of this—trudge up to the place of sacrifice with Abraham carrying a really REALLY big machete; in the other, the Angel stops said machete in its tracks and says, Whoa! Just stab that ram in the thicket! (Explain it however you will—and I am well aware of the standard gloss, “trust,” “obedience,” “foreshadowing,” etc.—for me this story remains deeply troubling. I’m a mom. And you do not go at your kid with a sharp object. Ever.) The next row up, Abraham sends his servant to find a bride for this same Isaac (yes, still alive! whew! and all grown up now!), and the servant meets a young woman with long, waving hair, jug of water in hand, standing at a well. Rebecca. How can stained glass so be made to capture her youth, beauty and gracefulness? It seems impossible, but there it is. She reminds me of my own two daughters, both young women now. She’s someone you could fall in love with, just at a glance. By row 10, Rebecca and Isaac have twins, Jacob and Esau. In pane 40, Jacob famously cheats Esau out of his birthright in exchange for ye olde mess of pottage. And at the end of row 11 Jacob wrestles with an angel. Yes. Jacob is a thief and a cheater who somehow redeems himself. You can be a jerk and God will still meet you hand-to-hand. Think about that. The next row up we meet a new character, and the artists devote three whole rows to his story—more than to pretty much any other story in the Genesis window, including Creation. And these three uppermost rows, panes 45 to 56, are what interest me most this morning, out of an entire soaring chapel’s worth of stories: 1,113 panels, to be precise. The story of Jacob’s son Joseph. Joseph. Yes. The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat guy. That one. We watch, pane by pane as young Joseph dreams; his father who dotes on him—sends him to his half-brothers; they put him in a pit then sell him to slavers (again, bad brothers definitely a theme; definitely a recurring event here); as a slave in Egypt, Joseph lands in prison where he interprets the dreams of his fellow prisoners; Joseph tells one guy he’ll go free and the other he’ll hang . . . and they do . . . go free and go hang, respectively; Pharoah has a weird and troubling dream with fat cows and scrawny cows, fat sheaves and withered sheaves; Jacob explains all: Famine Ahead, So Prepare Ye the Way of the Food!; Pharoah makes Joseph his right-hand man, sets him on an awesome looking Administrative Chair of Power golden-throne-looking thingey, dresses him in flowing Robes of Power, rewards him with a heavy gold Chain of Power, and appoints him CEO of Flocks, Crops, Distribution and Storage. Everybody has to do what he says and no matter how much they might grumble I’m sure they all appreciate it when they don’t starve later. Then . . . Joseph’s brothers arrive in Egypt, driven by hunger as the famine spreads. They do not recognize in the man before them, the boy they betrayed. But he recognizes them. Joseph sends his brothers home with food but keeps one for ransom, insisting they return with their youngest brother Benjamin (who, like Joseph, is the son of Rachel, Jacob’s favored wife). Upon their return, Joseph schemes to have them falsely arrested by planting an expensive goblet in their grain sacks. His soldiers haul them back before the powerful “vizier” (as one leaflet calls Joseph in the English translation). What’s he going to do? Is it revenge time? Payback? Vendetta-o-rama? Is he going to chew them out? Flay them alive? Throw them in a pit and sell them? Pitch their sorry asses into a cold, dark cell? And then there it is. All 56 panes in the Genesis window soar to this one point. Reconciliation. At the very moment he could crush them utterly, Joseph instead reveals his true identity and welcomes his brothers. He makes himself known, Just As He Is, vulnerable. And they are reconciled after all that. Reconciled. Greeted. Welcomed. Forgiven. Reunited. Seen and known as kin. In case you haven’t read it lately, there is a lot in Genesis. Way more than 56 scenes. So the artists constructing the window had to choose what mattered most. What mattered to them. OK, yes, they began with the Creation of the Heavens and the Earth. They had to do that. They had to start with chapter 1, verse 1, “In the beginning . . .” And there’s other stuff they couldn’t miss: Paradise Lost! Cain and Abel! Noah and those cute animals in the ark! But they couldn’t do every scene of every story, so what we see is really what the artists thought mattered most. And they chose for this glorious window-book to end, to soar up to, to have the last word of the top pane be: Joseph clasping hands with his younger brother Benjamin, while the other brothers look on, each awaiting his turn to finally make it right. My husband and I have spent a good part of this past year estranged from our oldest daughter. There is no greater pain for a parent than to lose a child—and estrangement is a kind of loss. How do you know it won’t last forever? How do you know this isn’t where the door slams shut? And there you are, clutching your memories of diapers and lullabies, recitals and graduations, but no longer invited to walk open armed into any new adventures? We’ve spent a good part of the past year, struggling to be reconciled. Struggling to understand. Struggling to be understood. I’ve had more than I care to reveal of crazy rage and self-loathing despair—it’s like the way you love your child, beyond words or understanding, is the hidden magma of your heart, where love that’s so deep it’s elemental connects to other hidden lava tunnels that can also shoot out in self-destructive fury. I’ve had more than I care to reveal of trying to take steps forward and trying to take steps back and difficult conversations and turning things over and over and over to see how to make it come out right. I won’t drag you into the details. But the moments of reconciliation we’ve finally found, the sudden grace after all that, of being reconnected, parent to child, regaining those bonds, the sweetness of just getting to sit together in harmony and feel restored, like somebody had cut my arm off but now it’s back and I can touch, hold, and feel what matters most—just the ordinary, ecstatic happiness and wholeness of all that is what is sweetest and most precious. And that’s the moment, this massive, towering, light-filled window soars up to: Joseph and Benjamin, strangers made brothers, lost made found, torn apart now mended, restored, made whole. Like I said: It’s December 20. The 24th day of Advent. Five days till Christmas. Looking at this last pane in the Genesis window, thinking about Joseph and his brothers and about the choice to be known, the choice to reveal oneself, the choice to reconcile, I think the makers of these windows knew, too, about the sorrows of estrangement, anger, misunderstanding, about the wounds that make other wounds keep happening, about the damage done and the hurt inflicted and the What do you do with it? And the joy-beyond-belief when you can once again reveal yourself, be kin, clasp hands, be reconciled. After two hours, we were both so cold we had to stop sitting-and-looking and start moving. We left Sainte-Chapelle and stepped back into the drizzling rain, swarms of people, noise, and traffic of 20 December 2022. Across from the monument—directly across the street—we found a brightly lit, gold encrusted Belle Epoque café. We went in, still cold to the bone, and ordered the usual coffee-croissant combo. I sat, clutching my cup in my hands, waiting for the shivering to stop and the warmth to kick in, looking out the window at the passersby, wondering what joys and losses each carried in their own hearts.