Before me, Église Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, à Québec.

Within her stone walls, an inner space of wood and plaster, painted dead white, a gilded alter before.  None of this is remarkable: the tender Marie, the bleeding Christ, in their glossy painted colors.  But suspended, mid-space, a model ship, perhaps a meter long, her mast a meter high, a ship - a French colonial ship, warlike and vulnerable, an armed fetus, its Falu red keel above me like an infant spine, curling in on its viceral crew and settlers in passage.

She possesses the volume of the church.  It responds by seeming less church air than Atlantic terror made breathable transparance, centuries ago but here the way an old tomb is both then and here, the way oceans are at once ever and now.  And in a mind's moment, the walls respond and the atmosphere of the church seems not water but the ship's ethereal aura - it has held at bay the deep demons, and this is its ambit, a walled protection, a fortress of faith.  The ship has cast out death and we are safe within the stone perimeter of its colonizing fierté.  As we are dry and living, so we are catholic.

The windows of the church are not large, but small-set, as jewels - as glass carried from the old world must practically have been - and also as threats - as any opening to this cold, hard world must have seemed: practically a invitation to savage leaks, a cascade of danger that could swamp the hardy, terrified faithful below, and set the suspended model above, afloat, adrift, into the terrible, Canadian vastness.