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A reflection and prayer to start the day with Rev Cheryl Meban

Good morning.

The Cathedral at Chartres was begun in 1145, but fifty years later, it suffered a major fire. It was rebuilt so well that it stands, well preserved, still with its nearly 800 year old original stained glass windows. My friend’s family friend Christiane drove us, my schoolfriend and I, in her Citroen 2CV the 50 miles from Paris, to see Chartres. At 14, we didn’t fully appreciate it. But it was so other-worldly, so colourful, majestic, full of – to me- alien code and mysterious architecture, I had no translator to interpret the language of medieval or Gothic Christian spirituality into my low-church simplistic Biblical faith.

I didn’t understand it, but nor was I afraid of it. I was from a Plymouth Brethren background - we said we weren’t Catholic or Protestant, We were Christians. Our faith was based on keeping it simple – God relating to humans through God’s Spirit bringing the Bible to life – This faith had, as I heard it preached, no room for holy places or sanctuaries – God’s chosen dwelling, we knew, was human bodies, the temple of the Holy Spirit. Our worship of God should not be distracted by things made by human hands.

And yet, as I have grown in God, the gift of creativity and artistic expression, lifting spirits by shaping physical environments, and sounds - all this belongs, too. I felt the impact of Chartres cathedral - its size, its situation in the landscape, but also its sheer age, testimony to generations and generations touched by stories told in these windows and stones.

God of All Truth, creator of stone and light, of fields and spires, persevere with us, to write your eternal story of Word made flesh. Amen