The Oude Kerk was beautiful, but although I knew that it is a church in use and there had been a wedding there shortly before our visit, it did not touch me as places of worship sometimes do. Perhaps it is the tourist crowd wandering through. Perhaps it is the fact that I could not figure out the direction of the sanctum. I am not sure why.
I sometimes feel that tourists traipsing through places of worships with guidebooks and cameras just take something away from what makes them special. At the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (Wat Phra Kaeo) in Bangkok, there were worshippers surrendering their innermost concerns to the compassion of the Buddha, while tourists used noisy flashes, beckoned and pointed things out to each other, reading from guidebooks haltingly. The wonder then is not the object or the space viewed but the steady candle of faith which does not flicker when surrounded by these disruptions. At the Monastery of Jeronimo in Lisbon, we arrived in the middle of a Sunday morning mass. The tourist crowd paid no mind to its solemnity, and guides pointed out graves and carvings as though their exhibition was the primary purpose of the chapel. Still, in both those places, it was hard not to notice that the air was thick with faith and the possibility of grace.
At most of the churches we have visited in the Netherlands, I have missed that unmistakable element. There are exceptions: The Church of Our Lady in Maastricht and the Catholic chapel of the Begijnhof in Amsterdam.
