The Jesuit Church of Our Lady's Assumption

 

The Jesuit Church of Our Lady's Assumption

Feb 19 2022

There is something about a ruin

that touches me.

There is hubris, of course;

the folly of man

his illusions of greatness.

There is the history it holds,

my imagination

peopling the place

with all the sturm und drang

of faith, commerce, war.

And the haunting beauty

of slow relentless decay.

A glorious ruin

of broken statues

tumbling walls

crumbling stone,

lush green moss

softening the brickwork.

Great murals

exposed to the elements.

Mice taking shelter

and birds making nests,

trees

growing up through cratered floors.

And bright sun

angling-in

where it never shone before,

as if to sanitize the place

illuminate its heart.

In Hiroshima

the Jesuit Church of Our Lady's Assumption

still stood after the bomb,

the dome largely intact

eight priests

somehow alive.

I don't know about faith

on that terrible day

or the mercy of God,

but the image has become iconic

and the Genbaku dome still stands,

a sobering reminder

of total war.

How poignant

defiant

and sad it seems.

A ruin

in a bustling metropolis

surrounded by traffic and noise.

So familiar

I suspect it's largely ignored,

as people

go about the business

of living day to day,

and as bigger buildings keep going up

on the wreckage of the old.

Because we always build higher

and reach for more;

obscuring the view

and blocking out the sun.

I didn't much like today's offering in the Writer's Almanac (see below). But I immediately pictured the bombed out church, and it reminded me how beautiful such ruins can be: enduring, like mute testaments to the past; the physical beauty of decay; and the poignancy of something so resilient yet so fragile looking.

It also immediately evoked that iconic image from Hiroshima. When I googled, I found that this building still stands.

The Lamb
by Linda Gregg

It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’s fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.