April 26, 2006

Cathedrals

Canon P D Quirk says that when you’ve seen one old-world cathedral and a few American lookalikes, you’ve seen them all. Their vaults, their bosses, their windows vary, but the floor plans are more than likely cruciform, and the side chapels remain about the same. It never made him all that popular.

Of course, I really can’t say that because I’ve never seen them all and probably never will. Rather do the cathedrals I have seen usually start me to thinking about the people who built them. They worked more than likely at altogether unChristian wages in all kinds of conditions and seasons and weather and light and with all sorts of risks and tools, powered largely only by themselves. 

And I wonder if it made any difference to them at all whether it was a cathedral they were putting together or just a pile of cut stones whose numbers and shapes they’d best keep in order. I like to think they knew. And cared. But that’s the kind of dreamer I tend to be.

The gospel is like that. Words, languages, made flesh like the Lord who inspired it, who proclaimed it, who died for it, who conquered the principalities who killed him for it. Who rolled a stone in their faces. And we, like the cathedral builders, are gospel builders, laying ourselves alongside the Cornerstone, our floor plans also cruciform, but never quite the same. Facing east, like the cathedrals, where the Son also rises. I hope that sometimes, at least, we care.

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