All Saints' Day - Year B

Our souls inspire: The purposes of cathedrals

Following the Consecration of St John's Cathedral on Thursday evening, the Rev Jan has asked me to say something about the great event, especially for the benefit of those who couldn't attend. As Sir Humphrey Appleby would have said, "That's a courageous decision, Minister." In particular, she has asked me to talk about the purposes of cathedrals and their role as places for the faithful - the Saints of the Church - to gather in communion with God and with one another. I take as my text, one paraphrased by the Archbishop in the Consecration, from chapter 2 of the first Epistle of Peter: "Come as living stones, and let yourselves be used in building the spiritual temple." It is also paraphrased on the back of the parish commemorative bookmark.

As some of you have heard me say during parish visits to St John's, cathedrals fulfil a number of official roles - they are parish churches for many people, they are mother churches of dioceses, they are civic centres for cities, state churches for nations and centres for arts like music, painting, sculpture, embroidery and drama. Large numbers of people come for such official or formal purposes, including regular services, weddings, baptisms, funerals, memorial services, concerts and art exhibitions. But cathedrals also have large numbers of casual visitors, who simply come to see and experience them - to be there. St John's Cathedral is host to some 20,000 casual visitors each year - pilgrims, tourists and merely curious passers-by. This is nothing compared with the vast numbers who visit the leading celebrity monuments of the world like St Peter's in Rome, Notre Dame in Paris and the unfinished Church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, each of which may be visited by 20,000 people a day. What is central for my theme is that many of both types of visitors, the formal and the informal, expect that they will have an experience in the cathedral beyond the ordinary; they expect that they will be impressed, challenged and inspired. Some expect to have a spiritual or religious experience. After travelling long distances, often at considerable cost, many visitors clearly do experience something uplifting in their time inside cathedrals, even though some of them are not regular church-goers or even Christians. From time to time, I have checked the St John's Visitors Book to see how they respond and found that most make comments like, ‘Beautiful', ‘Magnificent' and ‘Awesome'. There is another rather different strand of comments that say - ‘Peaceful' or ‘Serenity' - and a third that comprises not comments, but exclamations such as - ‘Thank you!' or ‘Glory to God!'

The range of reactions of those who visited and obviously enjoyed their visit - from awe to peace to ecstasy - should alert us to an important caveat: All people are not like us. (Remember Professor Henry Higgins' plaintive chauvinistic cry, "Why can't a woman be like ... me?") People, for all of the commonalities, vary enormously in their cultural background, in their needs, in their way of thinking and in their emotions, so they do not react to churches in the same way. Christians do not all worship in the same way! Consider the variety of building styles, liturgies and music. You may remember the article I wrote for Outlook on Grovely some time ago about the contrast between the appearance and atmosphere of St Peter's Cathedral, in Adelaide, and those of the stark little Quaker Meeting House beside it. For some travellers, two churches in a day is at least one too many and some of our relatives and best friends would rather go to the dentist than take part in ‘worship' of any kind. What is surprising is that some of the most religion-phobic people nevertheless do enjoy visiting cathedrals and appear to be enriched by the experience.

Now, I have been arguing that, despite the commonalities, there are significant differences in the levels and kinds of appreciation of cathedral visitors. This is by way of preparation for another, more challenging, perspective: The Gothic cathedrals of the late Middle Ages were not built by or for people like us. We may think we understand and appreciate them, but I would like to take you back six or seven hundred years to a time when the common perceptions of the world, the cosmos, God and the purpose of cathedrals were different in other ways.

First at the simplest experiential level, we have been brought up on film and television images of great buildings and have visited hundreds of them, so we are relatively hard to impress. Our ancestors probably saw only one cathedral in their lifetime and the only other large building in their experience was the local castle, which they might be lucky to enter just to scrub the floors or muck out the barn. We have also been blinded by bright lights in the home, the shops, the workplace and the church. (Point to ceiling!) Medieval people saw what we would call bright light only in the fields in summer. A cathedral that we perceive as dark or even dingy, they would have seen as dazzlingly lit by stained-glass windows.

What most separates us from our ancestors, however, is our different understandings of the universe and of the significance of arts, crafts and buildings. Most importantly, they took things literally, even more than fundamentalists do today. They believed that heaven was a real place, more real than the world, up there above the sky so, by being tall, the cathedral was nearer to God and the towers and spires pointed towards God. They believed that numbers and proportions were God-given and thus had divine power, so their cathedral might have three towers (for the Trinity), twelve pillars (for the disciples) and a nave that was three times as high as it was wide. Artists still follow some of these principles, though they rarely see a religious connection.

In this religious environment, cathedrals were, in the words of contemporary writers, a ‘representation of supernatural reality', ‘the New Jerusalem', ‘symbols of the kingdom of God on earth' and ‘a mystical vision of harmony'. So, medieval Christians entering a cathedral, providing they had an orthodox faith, probably experienced a level of awe beyond our understanding. It seems, however, that all has not been lost. Many people still like to visit cathedrals and some remnants of the medieval sense of beauty, mystery and awe survive our scientific knowledge and rationalism. And perhaps our greater education and our freedom of thought have brought compensating benefits. We may no longer believe that natural phenomena are magical or dependent on God's whim, but great mysteries of nature still exist and Nature is all the more awe-inspiring for our hard-won appreciation of its complexity and of the infiniteness of time and space. Our knowledge should also help us to appreciate better the history of our Faith and its sacred places. Thus a visit to a cathedral puts us in touch with Christians around the world, as it has historic and legal links with the universal Church, especially with our 77 million sisters and brothers in the Anglican Communion. This sense of communion and fellowship is a central feature of Christianity that is made concrete in its buildings. In the pre-Christian world, religious buildings were generally not spacious, the inner-sanctum, the holy-of-holies having room only for the priest. But the early Christians were a social crowd and insisted on getting together inside the building for their rites. The church building was not complete until the ‘living stones', the Saints of the Church had entered. That's us!

I began my talk by referring to the text, "Come as living stones, and let yourselves be used in building the spiritual temple." This passage from New Testament Peter is prefigured in Old Testament Isaiah. The imagery of buildings abounds throughout the Bible, with metaphoric references to stones, cornerstones, foundations, builders and plumb-bobs. If you want to see the final excessive flowering of this building imagery, see the description of Heaven in the second last chapter of the Book of Revelation. I won't quote from it to finish, but rather from a famous Christian builder of the 12th Century, Hildegard of Bingen. In one of her hymns, she refers to the Heavenly Kingdom, the New Jerusalem, in this way:

O Jerusalem, city of gold,
adorned with the purple of the King;
O building of highest excellence
which is a light never darkened.
....
Your windows, Jerusalem,
are wondrously adorned
with topaz and sapphire.
....
O Jerusalem,
your foundation is laid
with showering stones
....
Then your walls blaze with living stones,
who by the greatest zeal of good will
have flown like clouds in heaven.