“Some people were talking about the temple and the beauty of its fine stones and ornaments. He said, ‘These things you are gazing at–the time will come when not one stone will be left upon another; they will all be thrown down.’ (Luke 21:5-6, REB)
Twenty-three years ago I slapped my hand on the Romanesque wall, exposed by renovations, of Chester Cathedral and said to my host, this is the church Anselm knew. There has been a church on the site since the eighth century. The building now is Gothic in style, but that is wrapped around an earlier Romanesque structure. And so I knew that back when “Cur Deus Homo” (Why a God-Man?) was hot off the copying desk, its author, Anselm the Archbishop of Canterbury, was visiting, the wall he would have touched was the wall I touched.
Ten years ago in Jerusalem I placed my palm against a large well-worked stone. It was set in the Western Wall, foundation stone of the third Temple, built under the direction (and the lash) of Herod the Great, just before Jesus was born. Despite our Savior’s words of prophecy, not every stone fell away from every other. The Romans, when they came in destructive fury, left a few standing, just a few. They are the largest and oldest and best-fashioned of the stones in the wall. Though I doubt the soldiers of Titus spared them out of respect for the stone masons.
Stones last. Sometimes they are repurposed: they become spolia, salvaged or stolen from an old ruined (mostly) building and put to new use. Churches in Rome have pillars from pagan bath houses. Churches in Spain have stones that were once in mosques that were once churches.
Sometimes they stay where they were put, for a very long time. Sometimes they are in ruins, evocative of earlier, lost ages, and forgotten rituals.
Stones last. But not forever. And they don’t matter anyway. That is what Jesus tells us. “The Lord is faithful” - the steadfast love of God : that is what endures.
JRL+
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