English Cathedral Tour - Part II

For those who have been waiting eagerly for the next installment of my blog (which means you, Mom and Dad...), the only excuse I can give for my recent lack of writing is that I am at Oxford. By this I mean that in any given week, I typically have 4-5 books to read, and 10-20 essay pages to write. For example, I had an essay assigned to me last week in which I was to answer the question, "what is art?" It reminded me of a Saved By the Bell episode in which Lisa Turtle, in an attempt to impress a snobby, pseudo-intellectual schoolmate, utters the timeless phrase,

"What is art?
Are we art?
Is art art?"

I always thought the philosophical insights posed by Saved by The Bell were underestimated. The tutor's name who assigned the "what is art?" essay is Christopher Lawrence. He wears black jeans and sports a long black ponytail which he incessantly pushes back in a Fabio-esque manner during our tutorials . He likes to make jokes about Derrida, Wittgenstein, and other Oxford tutors who inhabit opposing philosophical camps. You get the picture.

Anyway, I want to get back to narrating the English Cathedral Tour, 2006, specifically the last two days in York and Ripon. But since my trip was so long ago, I have to refer to the journal I kept during my journey, and all I find when I open it is hurried scratches keeping track of the money I spent and the English birds I spotted. (And by birds, I mean winged creatures proper for ornithological study, not stylish British females.) I thus think it best to get on with some good pictures and a list of highlights from the last two days of the tour.

(enter drum roll...)

5. The Thorpe Prebend House Tour in Ripon, 10.02.06

The Thorpe Prebend House is a 15th Century home-turned-historical museum that tells the story of the town of Ripon. Literally, the only attraction in Ripon is the cathedral, so you get the impression that the museum's curators had to scrounge about for some vaguely famous names to throw in the exhibits. (For example, author Lewis Carroll's father briefly worked as the chapel dean at the cathedral, and yet there was an entire room just about "Alice in Wonderland.") I was the only person in the museum that Monday afternoon. But what made the museum so delightful was the elderly man who worked there and took me on an extensive tour around the House. I would say he was about 72 or 73 - bespectacled and wearing a frumpy blue sweater. He clearly took great pride in his job and the facts he had so diligently memorized about the exhibits. He did not leave a detail out - down to the estimated age of the wood beams in the ceiling - but I felt it best to take notes during the lecture, to assure him that his job was meaningful to at least one person.

Here are the best pictures from Ripon Cathedral, later that day:

4. The next highlight is a picture, also taken in Ripon on 10.02.06:

3. Sung Eucharist service at York Minster, 10.01.06

It seems that church-goers tend to make a novelty out of the style of worship antithetical to the one in which they grew up. For most of my life, I've attended a church where people raised their hands and danced about and drank coffee out of styrofoam cups during the sermon. So I have most recently become very interested in a liturgical form of worship. It certainly helps that I currently live in Anglican Town Numerus Unus, and that my roommate last year, Sara Gunter, grew up in the Anglican tradition and that her father is an Episcopal priest.

Anglican worship emphasizes the importance of communal tradition, creeds and confessions, visual images as a means of reflection, and most centrally, the Holy Communion. I have only started to understand the importance of act: that kneeling to pray is not about feeling like you want to kneel, necessarily. It is about making a public confession with your entire being, including your body, about your deepest beliefs, and acting with an entire host of saints who have done the same for generations. At this point in my life, liturgy is very appealing to me, because it means I don't always have to be double-checking to see if I'm "getting the experience" that I supposedly should be getting.

The morning service at York Minster was definitely high mass, all smells and bells, as they say. I had arrived early enough to sit in the special section between the altar and the nave. The seats were individually-spaced, like mini-thrones, and carved out of a deep, rustic wood. I really had to watch the people around me to see when I was supposed to kneel and cross myself, though I'm sure no one would have noticed, or minded, had I decided to raise my hands after all.

Pictures from York Minster after the service:

buttresses of the flying variety

O Constantine, you are looking so debonair as you survey the land you ransomed and pillaged.

2. A sighting of a rare English bird (again, winged creature, not hottie): the Bullfinch, also known as the Pyrrhula pyrrhula. Apparently these creatures are very shy and secretive, as their numbers have declined dramatically over the last 50 years, so I felt very privileged that one would choose to flash its bright pink feathers right outside the youth hostel at breakfast one morning. In ornithological world, I experienced what is known as a "lifer."

1. Worship in the crypt of York Minster, 10.01.06

While walking through the streets of York after Sung Eucharist on Sunday, I came across an advertisement for an Emergent-style worship service, to be held at a smaller Anglican church in York that evening. I had been experiencing some hestitancy and skepticism regarding the Emergent "thing," but because of my brief and very positive experience with the MayBe Community here, thought I might give it a whirl. (Perhaps I will delve into an robustly theological explanation for my hesitancy in a later post.) So I showed up at this church on Sunday night, only to find out that the location of the service had actually been moved back to York Minster - down in the crypt.

The crypt is one of the oldest parts of the cathedral, and at one point stored the tombs of famed people in the community. A little eerie. All the lights in the cathedral were off, so I had to walk in pitch black through the aisles to get down to the crypt. There was ambient techno music playing downstairs, with symbolic images and bright colored lights flashing on the walls. It was a little startling but refreshing to see the medieval and postmodern symbolic universes fusing together in one space. I think the original designers of the crypt were rolling in their tombs upon hearing Bjork played in such a "sacred" space. No, seriously: I actually heard one of them rolling around.

There were probably 20 people there, most of them my age. We sat on mats on the floor and had several liturgical readings, hymns, and an interactive prayer time. Most importantly, we shared the Lord's Supper, and it hit me that it had probably been served in that same spot some 1,000 years ago. Without my own doing or choosing, I belong to this beloved community that transcends time and space, and that in some way, I share more in common in my heart with a nun who worshiped there in the 13th Century than I can probably comprehend. Even though I didn't know the people who broke bread with me that night, I have to believe that I probably know them, in some baffling way, as well as I know myself.

"It is make-believe. You make believe that the one who breaks the bread and blesses the wine is not the plump person who smells of Williams' Aqua Velva but Jesus of Nazareth. You make believe that the tasteless wafer and cheap port are his flesh and blood. You make believe that by swallowing them you are swallowing his life into your life and that there is nothing in earth or heaven more important for you to do than this.

It is a game you play because he said to play it. 'Do this in remembrance of me.' Do this.

Play that it makes a difference. Play that it makes sense. If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.

The next time you walk down the street, take a good look at every face you pass and in your mind say, Christ died for thee. That girl. That slob. That phony. That crook. That saint. That damned fool. Christ died for thee. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee."

-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

sunset along the Ouse River, York

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.