Post-scriptum: So this ended up being a big sprawling Thing. I meant to simply share a poem this week. Alas it seems as if poems keep wrapping themselves around a whole bunch of other things. Thanks for bearing with all of my Thing-ing.
We live in a unique era which combines accelerated technology development, distrust of everything from our neighbor to the highest institutions in the land, over-reliance on mostly disembodied relationships on the internet, and modern (hidden) slavery for our economic conveniences…
Sorry. I’ll stop for the moment. You get the idea.
Still, I and many of my friends are questioning what can remain of institutions as they fail us; or more properly speaking, we fail ourselves through them. This week I listened to Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie talk through some of the ramifications of this period which they’ve dubbed The Great Humbling. (Or what the Caroline Ross gutsily calls the “hubriscene.” Love her.) So anyway, Dougald and Ed’s meditations provoked all kinds of feelings in me but the central image that seized upon my imagination was that of The Ruined Church. Ed had glimpsed a hulk of a medieval place of worship in an English village nearby whose walls were all that remained, the sky its only dome.
Yet within the boundaries of the ruin was a simple, thatched-roof church newly built to serve the simple needs of local worshippers. This is it. (Thanks so much to Dougald for generously sharing these photos.)
There is something about this combination of Ruin and Rebuild that keeps me going in the darker days. The pillars on which I have relied — the Church, Political Life, Police and Security, Public Health, Economics and Trade, Education, Academia, My Own Self — have been tumbling down (with increasing rapidity it seems) around my ears for years now. I wonder if you feel the same. My question is: when and how will they be covered with moss and what do we do about it, if anything?
I heard someone suggest recently (sorry I don’t recollect who at the moment) that we are called to perform compassionate hospice care for the age that is waning. I like that. Maybe the humble sanctuary built from the pieces of the former cathedral is also a kind of field hospital. The factories are coming to their end — what can we salvage? Between method and macgyvering, purpose and au pif what new things might we construct that will both provide palliative care to the old ways and help to midwife the new ones?
When I was still a teenager I went to Ireland on a missions trip. It was with a group of people I loved very much and I still hold much affection in my heart for many of them, however far we have scattered since. When I saw the pictures of St. Andrews above I thought immediately of the detours we took to see the ruins of several places of worship and castle manors along the Irish coast.
I left that church shortly afterward. The walls were pretty crumbly in some ways. I would make several of these moves from church to church for the next two decades, often for this central reason, though I only realize that now in retrospect. (I hope I can stop now. I’m tired. I’m taking it as a good sign that the name of my current place of worship is Restoration.) The various corners of Christendom I was occupying for a time were a bit like that Ruined Church. There was no roof and also not a whole lot of self-reflection on any of our part on what was getting exposed to the elements and whether the bits were even worth salvaging. There was (in myself, I will be first to say) too much hubris in believing that we had the cornerstone on truth. Fortunately moss doesn’t care. It’s a great equalizer. As the prophet Isaiah gloomily observed, the palace will be forsaken, the busy city abandoned. The hill and the watchtower will become caves forever--the delight of wild donkeys and a pasture for flocks.
So what comes after judgment day?
Over your Cities Grass Will Grow. This is unavoidably true. It also is the title of a haunting, beautiful and strangely uplifting set of images I glimpsed years ago thanks to Sophie Fiennes’ documentary which features the massive (40 hectare) installation of sculptor and photographer Anselm Kiefer in the south of France. His work, “La Ribaute” combines factory ruins, artworks and the uncanny wildness of Nature slowly making her presence known again. I love this vision of artistic work being a way to Rebuild and collect things together again in a way that makes sense and helps us understand ourselves and our place in the world. It also consciously abdicates part of the work to Fate, Providence, Nature, God. (Incidentally, the organization that houses La Ribaute is called Eschaton.) I hope to visit it someday.
Finally, the poem. It’s about another Ruined Church. This spring it will have been four years since many of us watched in shocked disbelief and grief as the towers of Notre-Dame-de-Paris burned. When we returned to Paris in early 2020 to visit old friends (like humans, dear old haunts, works of art) I remember asking Parisians on the bus about what it was like for them. Vacant stares followed, hollowed-out voices. There was a deep sense of loss for the symbol and beauty that had been permanently marred.
So I had to write about it. It’s imperfect lyrically, but pretty near perfectly expresses my mourning for the Ruin. My dearest hope is that it speaks to a Rebuild.
Pillars
“The monk's cell is that furnace of Babylon in which the three children found the Son of God; but it is also the pillar of cloud, out of which God spoke to Moses.” -Thomas Merton, Desert Fathers pillars of cloud tower upward from the city of man, welding the works of our soiled hands, smoking out the heavens with an empty hope, breath of babylon. language splits, hostilities quick to spark on a misheard syllable, disorientation on the heart's map, confusion our shared inheritance. once a pillar of cloud held high the gathering place in the wilderness, the sky an indigo cloth spread sweet over the children of man where they met with God to eat, to sing the interconnectedness of all creatures under the sun, signaling love, love and love alone in life, in death, in the exile in-between. spires strike and scatter our ashes to the edges and diaspora stars search the dark heart, lit sudden now by pillar of flame.
Beautiful essay. I am glad the sky is there when the roof is gone. I am glad the pillars remain to mark the ages of thought and good foundations. And it begins joy to me that others have built and are building smaller more intimate shelters of faith within. And still the sky is there and the stars and the wonder. I am glad.
Beautiful, Abbey!!