The Cathedral

Today was a day spent wholly in Canterbury. Yesterday, Sunday was spent going to church, worshipping in a near 1000 year old building and it felt perfectly normal, apart from a few small language and wording differences to what we are used to at home. The rest of the day was spent fairly quietly with Jane very busy at the Cathedral in the morning and with the conference getting going properly. 

Today, Monday, I headed down to Canterbury Cathedral. I would have to say that the experience was really quite amazing. The ceiling was impossibly tall it seemed at beautiful just to look at. I must have spent and hour and half just quietly wandering around the inside of the building, constantly coming across things that were special or beautiful or just made one stop to think about the events and people and the way that they have used the the place over time. Some of the special places in the cathedral were seeing the place where Thomas A'Beckett was murdered and where Archbishop Robert Runcie and Pope John Paul II prayed together. The martyrs chapel in the crypt was was also a special place. But just being there at the heart of our spiritual tradition was worth it. 

After spending such a long time inside, I spent about another hour just walking around the outside of the cathedral and taking in the way that time has treated the building. There is another period of restoration going on around the outside, cleaning away two centuries of pollution and grime to leave behind a creamy coloured stone, which gives an impression of what the cathedral looked like in earlier times. It was delightful walking around the cloister where once there were monks that were a part of the priory community. It was very soothing. One of the photos that I have put up today is a part of the cloister. 

All over the cathedral there are glimpses of what it looked like before the reformation where windows have been saved that date back to the 13th century, rediscovered paintings that were on the wall that have been covered literally for centuries. Down in the crypt there was a place where the whitewash had fallen away to show paintings of Tudor roses and other decorations. Yet even without all that artwork there is a special serenity about being in this Cathedral. There wasn't the same overwhelming wow of light and space that Salisbury Cathedral has about, but it is much higher, very long and very tall to the screen that separates the nave from the choir. then there is just as much again on the other side of the screen, chapels, tombs, and special places just to be. The other bit of fun was finding a piece of graffiti from 1604.

Tomorrow I am off to London for the first time.