A re-telling of the true 12th century love story of Heloise and Abelard. Abelard is a great philosopher and theologian who has taken, like many academics of the time, a vow of celibacy. When he is hired as a tutor for the brilliant and beautiful Hel...
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"His name was Astrolabe," Heloise smiles sadly beside Marie in the pew, her face drawn up to the windows. "I'm sorry," she brings the white linen of a handkerchief to her eyes and dots away the remnants of tears. "It is hard for me to speak about this part. Of all the parts, this one..." she trails off, her words floating up into the air in smoke, like the incense of Mass.
Marie sits beside her in silence, looking out to the altar of the chapel - looking up towards the faces of the icons... It is funny, she thinks: these men and women, these saints flattened to their titles, with their lives now drawn in 2D... they lived too. They lived and they loved.
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Their eyes no longer look so vacant and so foreboding.
Did they fear? Did they hope? Did they dream? Did they - as Heloise and Abelard did - have both a life within and outside of God? Is there such a thing?
"Heloise how do you..." she begins, unsure how to, "after everything that has happened, how do you still remain in devotion to God?"
Heloise sighs and straightens herself against the hard back of the pew. She dots the last of her tears away. "Because there are people, and there is God; they are two different things. And people make such horrible interpretations, and such horrible decisions, and they can be so rotten and warp His word as a tool for their own reasons, but... still, there is God. Sometimes I think, if you get rid of all the noise, you'll feel Him most."
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Marie nods solemnly, looking up again to the eyes of those painted all around her.
Heloise traces her gaze. "God breathes through all of us," she adds. "But we cannot put it into words - and when we try, our translations set a course for so many problems. All these rules, all these... I don't know what to call it... refractions?"
"What refractions?"
"I don't know," she scoffs. "All of it," she raises her hands to gesture around her. The chapel. The books. Her habit. "He can be found here, sure. But I think I felt Him most strongly back when I was a young girl, sitting under the shade of a tree by myself... In the quiet, I find Him most."
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