Ancient Truth | Modern Sound

When you walk around London the churches are old, and some are truly ancient.  Parts of Westminster Abbey were started in the 12th century!   So they are fascinating but, for the most part, dead.  To prove a point, this year I took several friends to Westminster Abbey.  This is a truly magnificent building created over centuries and a witness to world shaping history.  Even so, the only photograph I can remember my friends taking was standing next to the gravestone of a “Mr. Peesgoode”.  It is a photograph, of course, that only men could take.  Walking around Westminster Abbey there isn’t any doubt that the abbey is the creation of a world changing faith but it is a faith that, sadly, defines the past of the cities of London and Westminster.  Christian faith does not, it seems, shape the future. 

Or maybe not.  Over the summer I visited another cathedral that seems, in contrast, filled to the brim with life.  In Barcelona Spain, growing like a living thing out of the ground, is Europe’s largest modern cathedral, the Cathedral Sagrada Familia.  Sagrada Familia is not like anything you have ever seen.  It has an Alice in Wonderland quality that defies easy description unless you have seen the other buildings designed by its architect, Antoni Gaudi.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaud%C3%AD  Gaudi’s buildings (and there are many of them in Barcelona) seem frivolous but in fact are the product of the deeply held Christian beliefs of the devoutly catholic Gaudi.  Buildings were to have the shape and form of things created as opposed to merely drawn and constructed.  The buildings therefore do not have straight lines of the architect but instead the sensuous curves of the creator.  They seem to affirm life in its chaotic beauty rather than seek to control or capture the life of mankind.  driving around Barcelona you get to see several of Gaudi’s buildings and they are wonderful in the true sense of the word because, as you look at them, you are driven to wonder and awe at the vision of the man who could see these buildings in his mind. 

It is the vision of Sagrada Familia that first overwhelms.  The scale and scope of the story the building tells stretches the mind in wonder.  It is a living building where statues of the saints, sculpture of the life of Jesus, and stone en-carved quotes from ancient scriptures grow out of the rock walls.  Combine this with the work which continues inbside the building (even after 100 years of construction), where stone masons chip and carve their creations from rough rock, and you have a testimony to the faith that lives in the hearts of believers.  Gaudi devoted his later life to this masterpiece and when it is finished it will be a fitting monument to his genius for sure but more to the ever living power of God’s Holy Spirit to enliven the creation with this overwhelming creative force that spills force in the works of art that enrich our lives. 

It is too easy sometimes to think that the faith is for the last generation and that those who follow us will somehow not be captivated as we were by the life of our Lord.  But that confuses cause and effect as if we had better knowledge or insight than our children will have.  The constant thing will be the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ who continues to work in the hearts of men and women moving them, quickening them as the ancients said, towards a life lived with God.  Sagrada Familia shows that the faith still lives and inspires, indeed defies description in its unbounded creativity, and that we live in wonder at the works of our Lord. 

After the flood in Genesis God told Noah to look to the sky for the rainbow.   “I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth “

So, after hurricane Ike, we need to look to the sky for the rainbow.  The promise that life will go on is there if we will look. 

It is easy for me to say this I am in Moscow (again).  I did not feel the wind or the rain instead I only watched it on CNN.  Yet I do look to the sky and thank God for the rainbows in my life.  The number one is my wife Karen, who stares down a hurricane and says “make my day”.  “Stoic” could have been invented for her in these circumstances and her faith and unending practicality make my life easy.  I mean, honestly, I got a text message from her today (the power was down and phone out at this point in our home in Katy) wondering how I was coping in Moscow.  As I was ordering room service at that point I decided not to reply at precisiely that moment.  She is my rainbow. 

I know that there may be some who will experience only tragedy from hurricane Ike.  I understand that.  But the story of the rainbow after the flood is the story of all life after the fall of man.  Tragedy befalls us but God in his providence has guaranteed that there will always be a way back to him and a way bak to a whole life.   The picture in the post is hurricane Ike take from the space station.  How could something so beautiful bring such pain and tragedy.  Only God could explain this. 

This is my last week as a Brit.  On Wednesday I go through the swearing in ceremony and become a citizen of the United States.  Growing up in the seventies my view of America and what it was all about was defined by TV shows like “Starsky & Hutch” and “Dallas”.  It is a sobering thought to think that these are the prisms through which the world looks into America.  My dad, big Tam, liked America too.  But it was the land of Western stories of Louis L’Amour that he liked.  My dad was born too late – he would have been Rooster Cogburn in another life – he was born to be an upright man who would bring order from chaos, sixgun in hand.  Because of him, to this day, I can’t resist (who can) a good Western.  Despite being brought up in a Scottish mining village, me becoming an American seems more like predestination than a cosmic fluke.

 Even so, this has been a good last week to be a Brit.  The Brits had their best Olympics for 100 years.  Actually, exactly 100 years, because it was in 1908 in London the last time Great Britain was this great at the Olympics.  Even that is a bit of a cheat however.  In London in 1908 the British team fielded over a third of all competitors and there were a few Olympic events that year where the entire field was British.  So, I think it is fair to say that 2008 Beijing is the greatest ever Olympics as far as Great Britain is concerned.  On reading the stories of the athletes in the newspapers I am struck with a change in the athletes which I think represents a change in the culture.  We in Britain, especially Scotland, have been famous for the plucky effort which comes up famously short of success.  As a nation, we flatter to deceive.  It seems that these are not the Brits of 2008 however.  These current Olympians have a decidedly different outlook.  One cyclist was described as an athlete who “doesn’t do silver”.  Another went all out on the last corner and fell going for gold rather than settling for silver.  Getting nothing was better than just settling for second best.  I like them.  They are winners and they have a lot to teach us.  Just this week I was in a meeting at work where one of my colleagues suggested that the bid for work we had submitted was “competitive”.  Trying to emulate the British Olympians I told him being competitive wasn’t good enough I wanted to win.   On Wednesday all this will change in a way I am not sure of.  I will in some way stop being British and start being an American.   Since 1991 it has been like being a stranger in a strange land as I wander around trying to figure out the customs of another place and another culture.  I have lived in Houston and I still have not worked it out – maybe that is the point of course.  Maybe you only figure it all out at the end like the crime novels I like so much.  When I think about it becoming an American is a bit like becoming a Christian was for me.  I was close enough to the church as a kid to kind of know what it was about in a peripheral way but there was still a lot that I wasn’t familiar with.  I had to learn (am learning of course) to be a Christian.  I couldn’t count on those vaguely remembered stories from Sunday school; I had to make them my own.  I had watched the church in action and admired it but I only understood it when I became involved in it.  I didn’t know what forgiveness was until my wife forgave me.  I didn’t know what righteousness was until I saw it in the life of my mother in law.  And so, in living and working amongst other Christian people I gradually came to know what it means to be a Christian.  No Damascus moment for me.  Instead more like Pilgrims Progress, a journey yet to be finished. So, over my years living in here my view of Americathrough the lenses of “Dallas” and “Starsky & Hutch” has obviously changed.  I have learned to deeply appreciate Jefferson and Washington and the constitution.  The constitution, for example, applies to all who set foot in these lands, not just citizens.  That seems to me to point to how the framers of the constitution knew that this would be a special place that would offer unique solace to those who arrived here.  It did then and still does.  Do you know of another document like this – I don’t.   

A long time ago - in fact before there was a Great Britain - Jon Donne the English Elizabethan poet and Bishop wrote a poem to commemorate his marriage to Ann, the love of his life.  He called her a “new found land” which was the phrase of course that was used to describe the new continent across the sea.  He, a Brit, found in Ann what I found in Karen, a place of beauty, mystery, and danger, untamed by any man.  Like America.  So, this week I move from alien to citizen, Brit to American.  Thanks for the open arms.