I met them on the Gaspe' Peninsula — at the town called Sainte-Flavie, which is along the northern shore of this very beautiful part of Quebec. "They" are mostly stone or cement figures — eighty of them in all — in an art work known as "Le grand ressemblement" (The Great Gathering). And they have gathered to listen to one central figure who stands on a rock that is decorated to represent the world. While sculptor Marcel Gagnon does not say his work is specifically a religious one, to me, these stone "people" are listening to the message of Christ.
They don't stand in a churchyard. They stand on the edge of the sea — in the kind of place where Jesus did much of his teaching. Some of the figures stand in the water, while others fan out along the shore. There are adults (who are about four feet high), and the smaller children, and also sheep. The human faces express a variety of emotions — doubts, confusion, intensity, gladness, skepticism, superiority, acceptance.
These are people who are literally rough-hewn, and who know the trials of life. They may never have faced the shock of the events that took place on September 11. But when you think about Jesus' times, you realize that sudden death and brutal violence were common to the people who walked the streets of Jerusalem. Perhaps technology hadn't yet made mass murder so possible as it is today, but the Romans had refined brutality to an art.
