Little Adventures

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Mosaic

August, 1993 - We pulled into the town of Beaupre' in Quebec, Canada on a cool drizzly Tuesday. A few tourist buses had already arrived, but thankfully, it appeared that the crowds would be light at the cathedral that day. I parked the car, and through summer showers we walked across the church grounds and up sweeping stone steps to where massive doors were swung open in welcome. It was there at the entrance of the cathedral that we split up, Pam and Pete off to church and me to do a little exploring.

I walked away from the spare crowd of pilgrims and tourists, across the village road and up into an old graveyard on a hillside which overlooked the church. The rain started to come down in earnest, and I ducked into a small, open memorial chapel built all of stone. Inside I found the walls to be made up of plaques. On each was carved a message, a name or two and an address. None of the addresses were Canadian, all were from the United States. The messages in stone were interesting to read. All were to St. Anne and one way or another, they all said, "Thanks for the help!"

St. Anne, you may recall, was Jesus' grandmother. About 1658 a crew of fishermen who had survived a perilous voyage from France gave thanks to St. Anne for their deliverance from the sea by building a chapel for her here along the banks of the St. Lawrence River. Since then many miracles have occurred hereabouts, and in celebration a great cathedral was raised at this place in 1923.

Today Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre' is much like every other place of pilgrimage that I have ever visited. The cathedral sits in the center of its grounds, immense and ornate. Behind the church is a religious gift shop where water from the holy spring is available. Just outside the church grounds is a large building whose billboard proclaims a multimedia history of St. Anne's. Off in another direction are the tacky tea "shoppes" and souvenir stores. I enjoy places like this.

I ducked out into the heavy rain and raced back across the street and into a basement door that happened to be standing open. Mass was still going on upstairs, so this lower church was nearly deserted. As I shook off the rain, I ambled into a surprisingly long and broad room. The ceiling was low and covered with geometrically arranged arches. Each arch was covered with a different richly colored repeating decoration. I spent a quiet half hour there sitting in the pews and marveling at this wonderful work of unknown hands.

Rather suddenly a lot of people began to arrive to examine my empty church, and I knew that the Mass was over. I bucked the traffic and made my way upstairs to rejoin Pam and Pete. Our plan was to meet just inside the main church doors when Mass ended, and there, not 20 feet from my starting point, I made the best discovery of all. The vault of the vestibule was covered with more than 1000 small, colorful, mosaic pictures of birds, flowers, trees, animals, plants and strange symbolic figures. I got a stiff neck from looking up, and Pete finally had to drag me away, out into the storm to find a souvenir stand.