The Last Days - Part 2

Facing the nave from the chancel at 
St. Peter's Church, Eaton Square, London.

On Friday last, yours truly travelled to London for the Annual Conference of the Ecclesiastical Law Society to be held at St. Peter’s Eaton Square the following day (Saturday). This conference focused on the issues surrounding “Contested Heritage.” In the USA, we know this issue more in the secular sphere in the debates over statues and memorials related to the Confederacy and the Civil War. Here, the present issue focuses on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the revenue that it brought to the British economy. Often these funds were “washed” by use for “good” in charitable purposes. Consequently, large, and sometimes ornate memorials decorate churches and churchyards extolling the kind works of these benefactors conveniently omitting the historical origins of their wealth. How these matters get resolved is no easy challenge and in the UK, it often involves church law and the church courts.

St. Peter’s itself has an interesting history. In 1987 an anti-Catholic arsonist set fire to the east end, mistakenly believing that it was a Roman Catholic chapel. Within hours the church was fully engulfed. Soon only the Georgian shell of the building remained, roofless, with most of its furnishings destroyed. The church needed total rebuilding. With a total redesign of the building the result was a new and simpler interior, with a vicarage, offices, flats for the curate, verger and music director, a meeting hall, nursery school rooms and a large playroom for the church's youth club. Our day-long meeting was held in that meeting hall. 

In the nave at Westminster Abbey
for the Holy Eucharist

Of course Sunday was the Lord’s Day. I spent the morning at Westminster Abbey participating in the Holy Eucharist. To enter the Great West Entrance seems almost inconsequential, until you realize that just weeks before, King Charles and his consort walked these same stones in a sacred ceremony extending back a thousand years.

Touring such a place is not the same as sitting and waiting for a liturgical service to begin. As a tourist, it’s all just an artifact. As a participant in the liturgy, you realize that this is a living place – that it is a sacred place where people come to meet God and where God touches the hearts and souls of men and women daily. That is a reality that is too easily forgotten, whether here or in Cambridge, or Ely, or Lincoln, or York, or in any of these grand places. It becomes obvious soon after worship begins, and people begin to slink away once they’ve had their fill of the pageantry – once the words and actions get down to the business of worship and reflection.

Worshipping in a place like this makes a point about sacred space. In our harried and modern world, we can sometimes lose contact with the fact that we ourselves are embodied beings. We live in a world of flesh and blood not just a world of bits and bytes. We are more than our Twitter or Facebook feeds. We are people – made in God’s likeness and image – with the accordant dignity and sacred character.

We can too often neglect our need for awe. Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world. Places like this help us recover that sense. But we need to see them for what they are – more than a setting for a selfie. We need to see them as the work of human hands, with the cost of human toil and even human lives. We need to see the selflessness that they represent and drink in the vastness of time and space they encompass.

Awe helps us pay attention to the moral beauty of others. It draws us out of our narrow worlds. It helps to begin to see as God sees. It is there that we begin to meet God. This was part of my Sunday morning. It continued with my meandering walk through St. James Park later that day. The sheer beauty of nature – of families on picnic blankets – of children playing on the grass beneath ancient trees – of swans swimming in the lake. I probably would not have been nearly as mindful of this beauty without the initial experience of the abbey that morning.

(to be continued)