La Cathédrale

Many of the larger sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) are well-known and much reproduced – his three most famous works "The Thinker", "The Kiss" and "The Burghers of Calais" are particularly celebrated, but the Rodin Museum www.musee-rodin.fr in Paris contains a huge variety of smaller works, both sculptures and sketches, which are just as competent and significant.

One of them is "La Cathédrale" ("The Cathedral") from 1908 – reproduced on the cover of this magazine. It comes as a surprise to many people to discover that Rodin, with his complicated and relationships and emotional life, had a great sensitivity to things spiritual, and never forsook his Christian belief, although at times estranged from the Church. In his early twenties he had tried his vocation in a French monastic community, and to the end of his life retained an affection for it, to the extent of sculpting a bust of the founder and Superior of the Order.

"La Cathédrale" was inspired by Rodin's anxiety about the supposedly destructive effects of the wholesale restorations of the ancient cathedrals in France in the late nineteenth century. Rodin and others felt that, in the process of this work, the spiritual and social, as well as artistic, history of these buildings was in danger of being obscured. The holiness of a place, its capacity to reveal the presence and grace of God was as much tied up with how it had been used as with its stones – they were, to quote the poet T.S.Eliot, places "where prayer has been valid", places where God had been met and known in the gathering, the worship and prayers of his people.

"La Cathédrale" expresses this awareness. It is of two hands just touching, and enclosing a space. Significantly they are two right hands, of different people. The sacred space, a space for God, is made in this Sculpture not by the joining of the hands of one person, but of two, in coming together and in community. When people meet then there is holy space, the Lord is present in their midst.

Consciously or unconsciously, the sculpture witnesses to a New Testament insight: There is the teaching of Jesus about his presence "when two or three meet in my name" (Matthew 18:20) or that "the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you" (Luke 17:21 – "within you" is a mistranslation here, since the "you" is plural, and the sense is of the Kingdom in the midst of a gathering rather than just within an individual ) We can think also of Paul's sense of the community of faith being a Temple in which God is present

(I Cor.3:16-17) or a similar witness in Peter's first Letter, speaking of "living Stones and a "spiritual house" (I Peter 2:5).

Our two church buildings are indeed holy places, particular places of encounter and meeting with the God who fills all things, but we need to remind ourselves that we are a holy people – as we gather together, and wherever we gather together, the Lord is present as he has promised and there is sacred space. Are we willing and able to allow the community of faith to be the presence of Christ to us, and will visitors and newcomers come to meet him in our worship and fellowship. Pray that it may be so !

Roger Clarke

November 2006