Ablaze – Nick Dion

On a purely aesthetic level, all symbolism aside, there’s something awfully beautiful about a burning church. Well, about any burning stone structure really, but how often do we see stone these days other than in churches? The fire spills out the windows and eventually out the roof, but the walls stand firm as the glow emerges from within.

Last Friday night, February 5, a 117-year old Franciscan church located just west of downtown Montreal burned to the ground (http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Historic+Montreal+church+burns+ground/2532094/story.html). This isn’t the first time that such a thing has happened in Quebec. Last June, a 120-year old Catholic church in Gatineau was similarly engulfed in flames. Police investigators eventually found gas canisters among the remains; the investigation has yet to conclude in the more recent Montreal case. The Franciscan church had been out of use since 1997 and, even then, a leaky roof had forced services to be held in the church basement. The building itself had been condemned in 2007, when the Franciscans received an estimate of $5 million in construction costs to bring it up to code again. They sought permission from the city to tear the church down, in hopes of thereby facilitating the sale of the land. At the time of the fire, buyers for the land were lined up, but permission to demolish the church had yet to be secured.

In what way did this out-of-use church remain a religious place? Geographers and philosophers of space alike make an important distinction between space and place. For a detailed history of these two concepts and their interrelation, I suggest Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place. In a nutshell, space has often been defined as open expanse, as a container for objects. This definition has often been accused of presenting space as an anonymous monolith; today, discussion of ‘spaces’, in the plural, is becoming increasingly common. But my interests today lie in place, an equally controversial term that has, to follow Casey, been neglected almost entirely until recently. My work follows the lead of humanistic geography in defining place as affect-filled space, a definition which conveniently makes the analysis of place relevant to psychology and psychoanalysis. How do we come to invest affect, emotion, into the places that we inhabit. Humanistic geography (and former University of Toronto faculty member) Yi-Fu Tuan proposes three answers: a) through repeated experience, which creates a sense of familiarity with the place, b) through routine (an extension of the prior point, I would think) c) through religion, and, by extension, nationalism, or any other system that creates a sense of kinship with ‘the land’ on a grander scale. These three options allow us to create ‘fields of care’, networks of interrelated places that dominate our daily lives.< The ways in which places feed identities is another question entirely. It's no secret that Quebec is a highly secularised place. Since the Quiet Revolution, church attendance (only one indicator of a very specific definition of secularisation, I know - but that's another debate!) has been negligible, below 20% according to many sources. Still, many of the comments made at the Bouchard-Taylor commission demonstrated that religion does play an important role in the cultural identities of many Quebeckers... even if practicing that religion is out of the question. The newspaper article linked above mentions the reticence of the city councillors to approve the demolition of a church, especially one that old, as a contributing factor in the fire. At some level, religious places like churches, even when out of use, tell us where we come from. There's also a certain irony to the church's location that anyone familiar with the cityscape of Montreal might pick up on; the church is about a block from another great 'religious' institution, the former Montreal Forum, home to the Montreal Canadiens hockey franchise until 1996 and now turned into an entertainment complex. So while some places might trade in their 'practiced affect' for 'affective memories', there always seems to be another place ready to rise up and fill the gap.