As I write, it is one day since most of Notre Dame has burned. The reports are slightly conflicting as to how much was truly destroyed, "ravaged" by flames as the eye witnesses describe. But in any case, it's a breathtaking loss. It feels surreal. This magnificent, larger than life structure, full of grandeur, designed to lift the eye to the light and bend the knee to the holy has been standing for eight or nine hundred years.
I've been learning about cathedrals just as a matter of happenstance lately. Many of the podcasters and bloggers I follow have been writing and speaking about them. Most of the oldest, tallest, grandest cathedrals took generations to complete. One generation would begin the work, another would finish it. Perhaps three or four generations separated the beginning and the end, but the work was singular--to construct a beautiful gathering place to reflect on the majesty of God, to lift songs to the risen Savior, to quicken the imagination for the perfect city God is building for
us.
My modern American brain struggles with the idea of starting a work that I will never see completed. We build churches in a matter of months. We routinely tear down sanctuaries and start over to build bigger, better. We seem to make our churches ever darker--not lighter. Paint the walls black, use filtered lights, fog machines. Our ancestors would think we were nuts. In a time before man-made light, they craved light. Stained windows cast a holy glow over a place to open up the mind for contemplation. I wonder what our obsession with dark and fog says about our cravings. Maybe it's because we live in a world so full of stimulus, that we have to darken our worship areas in order to focus. I don't know. I digress.
So today I've been thinking about building cathedrals. It's a lost art. Communities just don't do it anymore. We don't quarry the rock and fell the forests and hire the artisans to labor for two-hundred years to build a place where our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will worship. We don't weep on the same altar where our parents and grandparents did. And that's okay really. The Holy Spirit is just as sacred and potent and strong in Saint Paul's Cathedral as in a hovel in Africa or a secret church in China. Some would argue, the earnest artistry has been overshadowed by pageantry and the Spirit has been hushed. Perhaps so in some of these grand once-sacred places.
Still, there seems to be a message in this. For me, anyway. A directive finally uncovered. I'm in a strange, quiet season where words don't flow and writing hurts. I've been reading and reading and reading. And listening to podcasts and soaking up whatever I can to wring meaning out of it. I'm hungry for answers to deep questions, questions that I've maybe carried with me my entire life but are finally bursting forth to be answered. As if someone had planted tiny little apple seeds in my soul when I was a baby, and now it's time for them to grow into a tree and bear fruit.
As I pondered cathedrals and generations laboring together, knowing one would start and another would finish, I felt some sort of deep truth blossom. Isn't this exactly what my grandmother did in her own quiet way? The woman never carried a chisel to carve a stone, she never worked with glass to reflect the light, but she labored in love for Christ. She served in her local church for decades, and at her funeral person after person after person after person stood to tell the story of how she loved like Jesus and their lives were changed through her. She loved us, her kin, her family with humble devotion. She taught her kids right from wrong and the promises of God. She loved my brother and me, her grandchildren, whole-heartedly but with wisdom. I
just said to my husband last night that when I'm tempted to complain about my kitchen (I cook on a hot plate, y'all, because I don't have a stove actually in my kitchen) I ask myself what my grandmother would do and I know she would do her work cheerfully. I try. I try to carry on as she would. She started a cathedral work; I've inherited the labor and I want my contribution to be as lovely in the eyes of God as hers.
It will look different. I tried to
be her for a while, but that doesn't work. We were created differently. I'm working with different spiritual gifts, different personality quirks, different talents. My generation is also remarkably different than hers--she grew up in The Great Depression and had her oldest children during World War 2. I'm in that displaced generation between Generation X and Millenials, where we remember library card catalogs but also had to be told Wikipedia isn't a legit source for research papers.
However, our striving is the same. My grandmother spent her life laboring for the Kingdom of Heaven. There's no cathedral I can point to and boast that she set this stone, she crafted that window, she hand-carved that gargoyle. But I am a living, breathing example of one who was changed by her work and her example. And I labor for the same Kingdom. The fruit will be in the people around me. My children, my someday grandchildren, my friends, my community....the people I may never meet who read the words I write. My words are like seeds blown into the wind. I don't know how far they may float or onto what kind of soil they may land, but God may bring fruition through them. I pray for this. I pray that my contribution to the cathedral pleases Him. And I pray that though I get tired and weary, I never give up.
I have to imagine that at least some of the workers in the cathedral had to wonder if spending their lives creating something they would never see finished really made sense. Certainly, in our modern world we would say it was stupendously inefficient and a waste of life. We crave production, end results, and mass quantities of them if possible. Thankfully the laborers of the cathedrals didn't quit when they couldn't see the end. And thankfully those who have labored on invisible cathedrals of the heart and soul didn't give up when they couldn't see the end either. They kept the faith, they finished their work, and passed the mantle to us.
I was almost done with this post and my kids came in. The writing bubble has burst. The words are just gone. As suddenly as they came to me, they're now gone. So I can't really "finish" this the way I would like to. I like to wrap up with something neat and tidy, poignant if I can manage it, quotable if I'm really on a roll. But. After ten minutes or so I've trying to manufacture something that's good and it just feels like a tangent or like I'm changing the point or I'm just plain rambling, I've realized something: this whole post is about doing work that can't be finished. I'm a writer with two noisy kids. My labor in their lives is perhaps the greatest work I'll never do, so sometimes I have to set aside the writing. I don't truly know what my legacy of words will look like, but I know what I want my legacy of love to look like. So. I'm leaving this blog post more or less unfinished to go do the work that will last. And I'll leave you with this simple thought: What are you working on that will last? What will out-live you?
And since words escape me and I find myself lacking the poignant, I leave you with a poem that has given me much food for thought in the last six or nine months. Just read it slowly, line by line, and consider how you live today and the cathedrals you build for tomorrow.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
By: Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
