St. John the Divine

I don’t believe in God. Not the God of my Catholic school classmates, the one who didn’t exist when they were out partying on Saturday nights, drinking and sleeping around, but who loved them on Sunday mornings and forgave them for their sins, even if they were still hung over. This God hasn’t appealed to me since I was twelve, when I decided I didn’t want to be confirmed in my parents’ church. I guess I believed in God before that, but I can’t remember. I know I liked going to church on Sundays and baking the bread for Communion in my Sunday School class. I have never been to Europe and been inside the Duomo in Florence, or the Siena Cathedral or walked around the Cathedral Complex at Pisa, but I do study art history, so I know what they look like. They are impressive, especially when you think about how they were built. They didn’t have modern technology. These immense buildings, all the more impressive as they move towards High Gothic, towards the sky, were built by hand. Many workers, stonemasons and artists and sculptors, put their entire life into a building that wasn’t completed in their lifetime. St. John the DivineThe first time I walked into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, near Columbia, I got goosebumps. It is HUGE (it is, after all, the largest cathedral in the world, and the third largest church). Like, jaw-dropping huge. Bobst is overwhelming in its own way, but Bobst is not a House of God. This building was constructed (with a lot of problems along the way, not unlike many of the thirteenth and fourteenth century churches) as a monument to this Lord. It was designed by an architectural firm, and its design has changed many times, and it is still unfinished. But despite all of this, it is still a House of God. I remember standing in the nave the first time I went there and being overwhelmed. I have already said I don’t believe in God. And I still stand by that statement, but for that moment, I felt like there had to be something to this: people have devoted their entire lives to this building, and hundreds and thousands of people have devoted their entire lives to churches and cathedrals across Europe. Are they doing their lives’ work for something or someone that doesn’t exist? It made me hope that there was something to it: that there really is a God, even a Christian one. It seems like too many people have devoted too much time to something for it not to exist.