The Sky Is the Roof: France's Secret Cathedral

 

Can an entire cathedral be a secret?

The Cathedrale de Jean Linard sits hidden in the rolling Berry countryside, near a village so small - Neuvy-Deux-Clochers - that most people drive straight past it without knowing either exists.

Jean Linard was a potter. Then he became a sculptor, an engraver, a painter. 

When he bought an old flint quarry in 1961, he did what any reasonable person would do: he started building a cathedral in his back garden, ad he kept building it for nearly fifty years, until he died in 2010

He'd been inspired by the Facteur Cheval, a postman in the Drôme who spent thirty-three years constructing a fantastical palace because he tripped over a stone one day and liked its shape. And by Gaudí, who started the Sagrada Família in 1882 and whose church - as you may have noticed - still isn't quite finished.

What connected these three men - Linard, Cheval, Gaudi - was simple: they had an idea, and they didn't stop. The stubbornness became the point. After a while it became something close to devotion.

 

When Rita and I reached the gate  of Linard's cathedral, we stopped. Just stood there for a moment doing something that's surprisingly hard these days - nothing.  

No working out what it meant. Just looking. 

Every surface was covered in mosaic made from salvaged things. Broken plates, coloured tiles, fragments of objects that had been something else entirely before Linard got hold of them. Ceramic figures peered out from the walls. Every religion was present, every god accounted for, all of them crammed together in what can only be seen as a cheerful theological chaos. 

And as the cathedral stands open to the sky, Linard himself once described it as the tallest cathedral in the world, because its ceiling is the heavens.

When Rita and I, after our visit, drove back through the Berry countryside, past fields and the odd small chateau, we talked about slowness. About what happens to your attention when a place has been made by one person, over decades, piece by piece, with no deadline and no completion in sight.

And about the broken things. The crockery. The salvaged tiles. The objects that had lost the purpose they were originally made for. 

We throw things away very quickly now. Objects, ideas, relationships, versions of ourselves. There's always something newer. The old thing worked fine, but the new one has better features. 

In Jean Linard's hands the discarded stuff didn't become evidence of decline. They became building material for something new. 

His cathedral is made entirely of things that in any other context would have been finished with. And it has the whole sky for a roof.

I don't think you can put it better than that.