As I sat at the top of Arthurs Seat overlooking the city of Edinburgh, I was in awe. It seems like you can see for miles, and it’s wild to think about all the stories that are playing themselves out in the city below. As we looked over the buildings standing in the hazy glow of the sunset, trees rustling in the breeze, cars and people passing by silently below, our mood was quite reflective. Lizzy said something quietly about the cathedrals we saw – they rose so high above every other building, so you always knew where they were.
That comment stuck with me as we descended the rocky trail, and it rolled around in my thoughts into the next day. I began to realize that all throughout the city, I found myself looking up. My eyes were drawn to the peaks of these intricately designed buildings. My camera lens found itself gravitating upward to capture the contrast of the pearly stone and the sapphire sky. The architecture of our cities, and our cathedrals, points upwards – the leading lines and artful spires of our buildings direct our eyes to the heavens. I’ve always struggled to feel at peace in cities, what with their hustle and bustle. It seems like I have to escape into the woodsy, mountainous, green spaces of this world in order to really feel my mind clear, and my Creator speak. This realization about architecture, though, brought me a great deal of joy – the voice of the Great Architect was reigning in the city for me, now, as well as the country. How silly of me to overlook His presence in all places.
This epiphany - of sorts - kept on rolling and ricocheting through my brain. I kept circling back to what Lizzy said about cathedrals. I felt like there was something about it that I hadn’t worked all the way out yet. I realized as I looked back on some of my photographs of that glowing skyline, that the scene reminded me of something a friend said once, about a map. She’d been talking about how if you looked down on a map of our campus, all the people who love the Lord might show up like scattered lights; like looking at a town at night from above. I realized that our aerial view of the cathedrals was sort of similar. Cathedrals are places set apart, and their design evidences this. Their form fits their function. Their spires make them unlike any other building in the skyline. Passersby and lookers-on can see clearly that there’s something different about these places.
These cathedrals didn’t will themselves to be grand or special or set apart. They didn’t make themselves holy or magnificent or extraordinary. Someone designed them that way. Someone, a Grand Architect, who could see the whole picture, placed them exactly where they were meant to be. He created them so that outwardly they would stand out and inwardly they would be filled with goodness. These cathedrals don’t have to do anything… they simply have to stand up tall, and fill the space they were created to fill.
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