Assignment One point Two

Hello.

Here is the second piece from my first assignment. I wrote these in late December, about the time I posted my first entries on Blog Spot: I hope you enjoy them and that you will stick with me to see how my writing develops over the next few assignments.

Thanks for stopping by,

Damien.

Visit...a place that interests you...(300-500 words)
The Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban has the longest nave of any Christian church building in Western Europe. This fact meant very little to me until the day I entered the place by the West door for the first time. I was awestruck, I’d seen nothing like it before, and even now when I wander in as a nonchalant local from time to time I am still taken by the size of this one room and its procession of columns and windows, ending in a vast pipe organ and carved stone screen with brightly painted stone statues of saints and martyrs from St Paul to Martin Luther King.

I am Australian, our oldest church buildings date from the 1820s and were built to look old. St Alban’s was built in its current form in 1077, even the “repairs” date back to the fourteenth century, although there is Victorian mock-gothic as well in some places. The place where I do church is a theatre in the West End, we have no statues of The Virgin, or frescoes of the saints, we have photographs of Freddie Mercury and an enormous LED screen. St Alban’s is therefore quite different to what I have known both architecturally, and as a worshipper.

Recently I attended a pilgrims’ service in the abbey: I was passing by at the time and so went in to look. The nave had been emptied of its thousand chairs, and was filled with people. Children ran around the columns, playing chase-and-hide; older people sat on blankets on the stone floor eating picnic, (it was raining outside), tourists with cameras looked at the frescoes while pilgrims sat anywhere they chose, just watching the scene and resting their feet. The service was lead by the sub-dean, who joked his way through the lessons, songs, and sermon; it was all very light-hearted and welcoming for those who had travelled a long distance to be there, and just as much for me who had “popped in” uninvited.

This is a cathedral which feels more than just a place where Normans used to gather to sing, or monks to chant, or Roundheads to pillage. For me, on that one day when I saw it “in action”, it felt like a church, where Christians would celebrate their common faith in God and St Alban, and where travellers on “the road of life”, as well as the A5, were made to feel as if this was home, at least for a short while. This is not my kind of worship, but on that day it was my kind of Church.