Ham Sandwiches on Ancient Altars
by on October 18, 2009
A few days ago, I had lunch on the ruined altar of a 1,500 year old cathedral in St. Andrews, Scotland. Allocating only 30 minutes for the meal, I ended up staying for over an hour.
These days golf pulls pilgrims to St. Andrews, and rightly so. The Links courses are quite the Mecca! But for fifteen hundred years pilgrims have been coming to St. Andrews for other reasons.
Legend has it that in AD 733, the bones of Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, found their way to this shore. For almost a millennia, these bones pulled peasants up out of Italy and Spain, through Gaul into northern Britannia. St. Andrews became the main attraction north of Hadrian’s Wall, rivaling Camino de Santiago in Spain, and even Rome and Jerusalem.
Located on the northeastern tip of the city, the cathedral is strikingly over-proportioned. It dwarfs all who enter, as big as anything you’d find in Durham, Ely, or Canterbury.
A Pilgrim’s Progress
Five minutes into my sandwich, I imagined what this cathedral must have looked like before its destruction. From the ruins of the apse, a pilgrim’s gaze must have immediately been raised. European cathedrals often elevated the eye, pulling it off of oneself, off of the me-ness inherent to humanity.
Medieval pilgrims had their problems: the loss of children, the death of cows, the failure of crops. Not to mention a bubonic plague that killed off about a third of them in the 1340s. Cathedrals spoke directly to these farmers and peasants. They were premonitions of paradise, hints of heaven standing tall in the midst of harrowing hells.
For peasants who had never traveled more than five miles from the place of their births, a trip to a cathedral like this was a trip to the edge of the world. The earth was still flat, you recall. It was an epic adventure, a memory to be told to many generations, rivaling John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or, in worser cases, Dante’s Inferno.
Pilgrims often entered these buildings on their knees.
Gutted by the Ruins
Ten minutes into my sandwich and my afternoon events were canceled. To think – there I was, eating on a slab of stone that Christians had been eating on for over a thousand years! It was a moment that utterly emptied me, a moment that underscored the temporality of life and the continuity of faith.
There I was, so small and insignificant. My life, so momentary and unlasting – a grain of sand, a blade of grass.
Yet I was connected to something bigger than me, something continuous and lasting. To stand (or sit as the case may be) in the tradition of the Christian faith, is a journey into paradox. That I, a little drop of water, should endeavor to join an ocean!
Granted, if I had been sitting on that altar a thousand years ago, I would have probably been banished from the cathedral and disciplined for my casual posture.
It was ironic, really, that a Protestant could enjoy so catholic a stone. I have always tended to believe that a pulpit should be located in the center of a church, not an altar (though I do hold to a Lutheran, not Zwinglian understanding of the Lord’s Supper).
Yet just because the watermelon has seeds doesn’t mean we have to throw out the whole fruit entirely.
Can we be theologically at odds with our predecessors, yet deeply appreciative of the continuity of their tradition? While unable to sympathize with a medieval reckoning of work-based righteousness, I’ve come to think of the Catholic church as a womb that can birth both a Francis of Assisi and a Benedict of Nursia, a St. Augustine of Hippo and a St. Patrick of Ireland – so opposite, yet sharing a common canal and category.
Can a baptist be a catholic? Anthony Cross and Philip E. Thompson make an interesting case in their Baptist Sacramentalism. See also the dialogue between Timothy George and Carl Beckwith, Can An Evangelical Be A Catholic?.
Ruined By The Gutting
John Knox, the great Scottish Reformer, didn’t like the cathedral here in St. Andrews, forgive the understatement. When Knox preached his anti-popish sermon here 500 years ago, the congregation marched up South Street to storm the cathedral. Not dissimilar to the Vikings who had raided monasteries like these in the Dark Ages, the Protestants stripped away its ornaments, icons, and treasures. The cathedral never really recovered from it.
Once a “poor man’s Bible,” the stained glass windows were shattered.
If I had I lived in St. Andrews, perhaps I might have joined them (though as an artist, I might have spared the windows).
The bones of St. Andrew promised healing, similar to modern prayer handkerchief ministries. Sick and dying peasants who couldn’t afford the journey traveled for hundreds of miles on pilgrimage in hopes of finding alleviation. Records show that some were healed, yet the vast majority of pilgrims exited the cathedral uncured and broker than before. This sad reality must have tugged at the hearts (and hands) of the Reformers.
Fifty minutes into my meal, and my appetite for history could not be satisfied by the contents of my lunch. A ham sandwich has its limitations, you know?
I pulled myself from the stone and headed back to my office in the round castle across the street (once a pilgrim hostel for those visiting the cathedral).
A nun once told me, “God isn’t tethered to a cathedral, but some cathedrals can be tethered to God.”
Perhaps this is such a place.