Repent all ye who enter here
After a preamble in the baroque chapel, a scramble up a hill, a ramble along a ridge, and an amble down a country lane, I arrived in what should have been the sleepy little town of Bruges.
I stayed last night at the Accueil de Notre Dame, in a monastery which was formerly the mother house for an order of missionaries, all but three of whom had gone, and which now serves several other religious functions, including offering hospitality to pilgrims. It was yet another one of those huge institutional buildings scattered all over Europe which once housed a large religious community, but is now almost empty. Its religious importance is evident everywhere in the town, in churches and chapels, and the stations of the cross which stand along the stony path as it zigzags up the hill.
Before leaving the town I paid a quick visit to the baroque chapel, its walls lined with religious paintings and Latin texts warning sinners of the hell that awaited them, a religion of fear that older Catholics will remember, and very different from the spirit of yesterday's mass. It was the kind of richly ornate chapel that is common in Spain, a reminder perhaps that we were getting closer to the border. A religion based on fear needed powerful symbols of its superiority.
Leaving the chapel, I climbed the steep path with its imposing stone chapels housing the stations of the cross, carved in marble.These were perhaps 50-100 metres apart, and stretched almost a kilometre up the hill.
At last I was walking on the ridge, with the river valley to my right, and the snow-capped Pyrenees to my left. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and all was well. it was glorious! Eventually the path wound its way down into another valley, and for several kilometres I walked beside the River Ouzom. Along the way I encountered a shapely young lass, a Bosom on the Ouzom, as it were.
At noon I arrived at Asson, hoping for a bite to eat, but alas, it was Monday closing. I pressed on, walking easily along the country lanes, and arrived in Bruges before two o'clock, still in time for lunch. There were four bars around the town square. I ordered a beer and a salad at the one that was open.
Bruges should have been a sleepy little town. The town square could have been quite attractive. At the top was the Mairie and towards the bottom, the monument aux morts. Newly planted trees, and beyond them houses and shops, lined the other three sides. Typical, you say, but here's the rub: diagonally across the square ran the main road, along which rumbled trucks and tractors and lorries at thirty-second intervals. Short periods of tranquility were interrupted by noise and fumes.
I met up with Servais again. We are staying tonight in a second-floor studio, quite Spartan, but comfortable enough. We had a meal together, more pleasant for the conversation than the food. He had been a high ranking nuclear engineer, working, among his other responsibilities, on a UN committee advocating nuclear power for the sake of the environment. He deplored Angela Merkel's cancelling of Germany's nuclear program, which was being replaced by coal-fired power stations. He convinced me that the continuing pollution from Japan's recent disaster was minimal, conspiracy theories to the contrary. Could the power station have been built, I asked, to have withstood the tsunami? Of course, he said, and had the private company followed government recommendations, not requirements, it would have been. It was a failure of Capitalism. This was a typically European point of view, which recognizes the importance of a strong central government. We talked about the dangers of nuclear power getting into the wrong hands, and I was left with the thought that we are facing the possibility of either a quick end or a slow one.
We too in Canada have a government that doesn't believe in spending money on necessary regulations, but would rather give it back to the people in tax cuts as a bribe to be re-elected. To give a few examples, we have cut back on census-taking to the detriment of social planning, we have cut back on food inspection resulting in more salmonella outbreaks, we have cut back on coastguard services and increasied the risk of oil pollution and maritime disasters, and, of course, we have cut back on environmental protection to make it easy for the oil companies to exploit our resources.
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