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.