It was just me, and God. Other than that, the columns and arches of the Saint Jean church in Joigny loomed over a vast empty and hollow but glorious space.

There had been someone else - a woman pinning an announcement to a notice board - but after she left, with a loud bang of the church door, possibly to suggest I shouldn't be there - there was just me. And silence. And God, most likely. I mean, if there was ever a good time to reveal his capital H self to me, this was it: no witnesses, no evidence. He could have appeared before me, done a little soft-shoe shuffle and said, 'See? Real!'

He would have had the chance to do some tricks to prove who he was, like turning the font water into a nice jammy Burgundy, or bringing in a few angels for a bit of a sing-along. Nobody else was there to witness it, and it would only be my word against the nay-sayers afterwards. But did He? Did he heck. (Note how I avoided the other H word... hedging my bets)

Liz and I went into dozens of churches and cathedrals during our year aboard Liberty, and although we became somewhat cathedraled-out, we were never disappointed by what we saw. The thing that always grabbed us was the sheer grandeur, the workmanship, the dedication of the masons, and the beauty of the whole. Because in the end, cathedrals and churches - including the one in Joigny - are made up of hundreds or thousands of parts, the sum of the whole being far greater than any individual piece.

And yet, sitting alone and small in my simple wood and woven seat, I gazed around at the light grey stone columns and vaulted ceilings, revelling in the masonry. The original building dated back to the eleventh century, but was remodelled in the sixteenth. Never mind, the thing that grabbed my attention the most was just one piece of carved vaulting. It was a piece at the top of a column, so was curved laterally but also was part of the jigsaw of vaulting above it where arches emerged to soar and thicken as they curved their way gracefully up and over to adjacent columns.

This particular piece of stone had the job of incorporating the sharply-tapered lower end of one of the arches, but - and this is where I felt for the mason - it was at the very edge of the block, meaning the mason had had to chisel out a thin tornado shape right at the edge of his stone in order to match the carving that would fit above it. Imagine a brick with a thin vase shape at one end, only the brick is curved and you'll get the picture.

While that must have been challenging enough, the thing I can't quite get my head around is how the architect or architects ever conceived of the finished church in the first place, to the point where they could then break the design down into individual blocks and order the stone masons to carve them to such precise shapes - often not just precise, but bizarre and totally non-uniform shapes.

Take many of these stones out individually and place them on black velvet, nicely spotlit, and ask people to guess what they are for, and you'd have a bemused audience. Together they make perfect sense, but as unique pieces they're, well, unique pieces, masterful creations as parts of a much, much bigger picture.

Two things then occurred to me. One was that many of the churches we'd seen dated from times when life - let's face it - wasn't easy. Existence, pure survival, was for many a daily challenge. Plagues, wars, crop failures, no central heating, an appalling lack of dentists... these were the ongoing challenges of your common-ou-jardin folk in France, and yet cathedrals and churches rose from the ground everywhere despite that. Massive, glorious, intricate, solid and beautiful... completely apposite to the everyday lives of most people.

The second thing was how neatly the composite parts of these houses of worship echo the whole theme of religion. Here we are, a society made up of unique individuals, many of us sharing common traits, but also many of us different, just one-offs. Together we do, however, form a whole, a society, and looking around and up at the soaring columns, the arches, and the geometric complexity of the stonework of Joigny's church made me realise it's a perfect analogy for who we are.

I'm reminded of that wonderful line from 'Monty Python's Life of Brian,' where Brian, mistaken for the Messiah, shouts desperately at the assembled crowd, 'You are all individuals!' and the crowd responds with one mighty roar, 'Yes! We are all individuals!'

We are all individuals it's true, but religions want us to be as one, to unite, and buildings such as cathedrals, or churches like the one in which I was sitting in in Joigny, seem to me to represent a coming-together, a completion, of disparate unique parts which, when combined, outweigh all the personal heartaches, challenges, and the misery many face.

Individually we are just pieces. Together we can be strong.

You may not give a flying buttress about any of this, but just for an hour or so today in Joigny I thought I saw the light.