Priest: Is Christchurch cathedral built on heaven or earth?

On his Food for Faith blog, Fr O’Connor wrote that “our Catholic ancestors appreciated this question as a primary consideration”.

“For them a House of God, while constructed on a plot of earth, was in fact more a sanctuary of heaven, a point at the heart of a diocese where heaven and earth could meet.

“Our Celtic ancestors understood that there were some natural places across a landscape where it seemed easy to connect with God, sites which they knew to be ‘thin’ places – where the veil was lifted between the human and the divine and where God and humans could touch.

“A cathedral is such a place. A cathedral touches the soul,” Fr O’Connor wrote.

The priest went on to recall the words of Msgr James Harrington in his homily at the centenary Mass for the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in 2005. Msgr Harrington asked: “What then is the secret of the Cathedral? Its secret is to be found in the text from sacred Scripture carved in foot-high letters across the façade ‘Ecce Tabernaculum dei cum Hominibus’. Freely translated: ‘Behold! Here God lives among people’.”

Msgr Harrington continued: “For us this cathedral is a living home, a place enriched with God’s presence. Its very mass bears witness to the sacred amid the secular, the eternal amid the ever-dying present. Like the great cathedrals of Europe this building proclaims the primacy of the spiritual and the kingdom we must seek above all else.”

Fr O’Connor resumed by saying, “Therefore, the one who enters the cathedral is no longer simply on earth but has crossed a threshold into a narthex of heaven, a place where interaction with the divine, both communal and personal, is the desire and the occupation. A haven where human potential is recognised and encouraged and where the failures of men and women are embraced as a personal capacity for and experience of divine presence and action.”

FULL STORY

Cathedral (Food for Faith)