Broken but not ruined

On Monday I spent some time with a group of new Chinese students who had just returned from a visit to Washington, D.C. Small groups of students showed PowerPoint presentations sharing photos from their trip and interesting things they had learned. When I asked what they had most enjoyed, most selected the obvious choices--the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the changing of the guard at Arlington Cemetery. One chose the Newseum, and I wanted to ask whether there are still funny headlines posted inside the stalls in the ladies' room but I wasn't sure the question would make it across the language barrier.

One Chinese student really loved the National Cathedral. Unfortunately, he did not get to climb to the top of the tower. "There's a great view up there," I explained, "And if you stand still you can feel the building gently swaying."

Two days later the building was swaying more than gently, and now it will be quite some time before tourists will be allowed to climb up that tower again. The Washington Post today features a terrific slide show on damage to the Cathedral (see it here), including a shot of a fallen angel lying shattered but with a hopeful look on its face. Fallen angels in Our Nation's Capital? There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

I remember taking my children through the National Cathedral when they were small and hearing them ooh and aah over the stained-glass windows. This was before they had seen Notre Dame, Sainte Chappelle, and Salisbury, all more deeply imbued with the romance of history than our National Cathedral, but it's still an awe-inspiring place full of beauty and wonder. I was especially moved by the Space Window, which is stunning to see even if you're not a space geek looking for the moon rock ensconced within the glass.

The last time I visited the National Cathedral, I was chaperoning a group of honors students exploring D.C. We spent the afternoon touring the Holocaust Museum, a sobering experience that challenges one's faith in humanity, and then we went straight to the National Cathedral for a time of quiet contemplation. Even for those lacking any faith tradition, the beauty and majesty of the structure provided a corrective to the fear that humanity might be irreparably broken.

Now the Cathedral itself is broken, but perhaps not irreparably.

In his preface to The Marble Faun (1860), Nathaniel Hawthorne famously described the difficulty of writing romance about "a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land....Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them grow." The earthquake provided a modicum of ruin, but will it be enough to grow some poetry?

Something tells me Hawthorne would know what to do with that fallen angel.