English Cathedral Tour 2006 - Part 1

Elvis Costello once said that writing about music is like "dancing about architecture," but I think his axiom can apply to any situation that requires using one art form to capture the essence of another. In this case, I am making a feeble attempt to write about architecture, and I find it's difficult to do without relying on stale academic terms I've picked up in Calvin art history classes. "Romanesque," "Gothic," "Norman," - these simply can't capture the sublimity you feel when standing in a 12th Century English cathedral.

It's no wonder that many people come to these cathedrals to just sit, and be. The experience of "the sublime" is that reminder that you are very, very small in the midst of such holy grandeur. The grandeur of a cathedral is one that points far beyond the arches and votive candles and stained glass of the building, and even beyond the generations of saints that have passed through it. It's a grandeur that points to the glory of Glory itself. Or Himself.

Such was the reminder that kept coming back to me this last weekend, when I took a solo tour of three of the most renowned cathedrals in northeast England - Durham Cathedral, Ripon Cathedral, and York Minster. The "English Cathedral Tour 2006" was inspired by a class I took last spring on medieval art history, and particularly by a whole night spent on English cathedrals and their distinctive ceiling ornamentation. (Maybe you can see why I went by myself!) But I went for more than cool ceilings. In part, I wanted to see if I could spend a long weekend traveling alone, without the comfort of mom and her maps. I wanted to have the selfish pleasure of meandering about unknown streets and cafes and bookstores without interruption. But mostly, I wanted some spiritual nourishment that I have been craving after the topsy-turviness of restlessness of this last year.

So I embarked on my journey last Friday afternoon, after having received two hours of sleep the night before due to a seriously boring paper on the seriously non-boring topic of 14th Century mystic Julian of Norwich, which was due Friday morning at 9. It took nearly eight hours to arrive in York, where I would be stationed for the weekend in a YHA youth hostel. I had one layover in the concrete wasteland of a city known as Milton Keynes, but the layover paid off because of a random and fascinating conversation about evolution I had there with a taxi driver. The youth hostel was a renovated Victorian home on the outskirts of York, and it featured a huge backyard with several birdfeeders and birdhouses. I thus immediately knew I was in the right place.

Every morning started off by 'stocking up' on free food at the hearty continental breakfast served at the hostel. This was the classic English breakfast: bacon, sausage, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread, baked beans, hash browns, coffee, and black pudding. One thing I learned quickly on Saturday morning was that black pudding is actually not pudding. It is blood sausage. This is sausage that has been cooked in blood. And I ate some. It was kind of good, before I knew what it was. In my naivete, I thought it was actually just a big lump of fried chocolate pudding. But it did not taste chocolatey.

Saturday afternoon I decided that I would visit Durham Cathedral, about a 45-minute train ride north of York. The cathedral, originally the monastery of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, was taken over in the Norman invasion of 1066 AD, led by none other than Medieval Bully #1, William the Conqueror. The cathedral sits atop a hill overlooking the Wear River, once the locus of Durham's commercial and social life. You look up at the cathedral and its imposing bulkiness, and can hear William saying, "I'm here, I'm Norman, I'm in control, and there's nothing you can do about it."

There was unfortunately no photography allowed in the cathedral for religious reasons, but I was still able to get some spectacular shots from across the Wear River:

I hope the pictures have whetted your appetite for more from York and Ripon...stay tuned.