The Inner Cathedral
“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”
The inward journey is like a cathedral: wide, vast, and deep, and soaring high above in stained glass panes and flying buttresses. Few images have captured the realm of the heart like that of the cathedral, or perhaps a fortress, but I will linger on the cathedral for its spiritual gravity.
Our Catholic brothers and sisters have learned the art of contemplation and the inward journey far better than we Protestants have. In many Protestant traditions, there is an almost allergic reaction to any hint of the self, the heart, or the inward journey, unless it is to talk about how devastatingly sinful it is. We have adopted Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity and Augustine’s doctrine of original sin entirely, seeing our inner self as only something to be obliterated by the sacrifice of Christ. We love the Romans Road, crowing, “No one is righteous, no, not one!” (Rom 3:10) We cannot see ourselves for the shining light of Christ that is all-consuming.
I wish to linger on the cathedral as the image of the inner self. St. Teresa of Avila used the metaphor of mansions to describe the inward journey of the heart to God in layers of sanctification; St. Augustine prayed, “Lord Jesus, let me know myself and know You;” John Calvin said, “Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God.” There must be knowledge of self to know God, for he created the self. The self is the image of God.
One can only know oneself as the Creator knows them when one can see oneself as their Creator sees them. We take on spiritual eyes to see the world—and the self—through the eyes of God. The created things are the only way through which we can glimpse our Creator; we have no other language for him but that which we have seen with our eyes, heard with our ears, and touched with our hands, though of course, he is not created and we see him only in shadows and glimmers.
A daunting task, to be sure. It is a reciprocal knowing: as we see glimpses of God, we see glimpses of our true self, and as we see our deepest self, we see God more clearly. It takes time to enter into the dark hallways of the soul and traverse the cobwebbed realms within. It takes patience, grace, and forgiveness. It requires self-denial of all that is false within, even that which we first insist is true, but there may be grace in the knowing.
Thus, the cathedral is an apt metaphor. The viewer cannot help but stand in awe of the vast heights and architectural wonder that belong to the cathedral—the naves and arches, altars and cells, stained window panes and shadowed chapels. There is much that is hidden in the corners, a history that stretches centuries past to believers who have tread upon its stones and kneeled on aching joints before lit candles.
There is also much bloodshed, for cathedrals could not have been built but by immense manual labour, and this was frequently uncompensated. Backs have been broken for the building of cathedrals, all so that a center of worship might be established by the reigning power. Cathedrals are a reminder of all that is corrupted in the history of our faith; it is the intertwining of church and state in a way that should never be, for it forces the worshipper to worship king as well as God.
And yet.
Cathedrals, dark and looming as they are, are a place where the veil between heaven and earth is thin, where many prayers have touched the iron skies and deigned to reach the throne of God. It is where saints and sinners alike have found sanctuary. It is a holy place because it is inhabited by both humans and the supernatural. It is where God’s feet walk on bloodied floors.
The soul, or heart, as some writers say, is like a cathedral, dark and looming, but also the place where heaven and earth collide in a singular location. It is where God dwells among us—and this is where our Western theology frequently supports dualism, arguing that Christ’s glory pushes out any semblance of our souls being human. We cannot be human any longer; we must be subsumed by Christ if we are to be regenerated and made whole.
I disagree.
It may be a matter of semantics, but it matters to me whether we start with the assumption that humans are basically evil and totally depraved as described in Genesis chapters three and four. Humans rebelled, and they paid the price; the need for redemption is clear. However, the generous, gracious life of God’s creation doesn’t begin in chapter three, but in chapter one, where everything was declared good and very good. The basic assumption, then, must be shifted to the very first chapter with the knowledge that all was created good for and by the sheer delight of the God who breathed it into existence.
This includes humanity—our very hearts and souls. Despite the garden rebellion, I choose to believe that the basic assumption of human goodness stands. Humans were created good. The world is broken, no doubt. Evil and corruption crept into the garden and have come to stay to wreak havoc on this earth. We face the choice, generation after generation, to follow God’s way of life or to follow our own way, a way that consistently leads to death. Some were obviously faithful—Enoch walked with God until he was taken up in glory to be with him, as did Elijah; others weren’t so lucky, but were still considered faithful—Abraham, Hannah, Joseph, Ruth, and so many more.
The propensity for human goodness still exists. It is our heart’s longing to return to Eden, and this is met in Christ Jesus, who took on every drop of corruption, blame, and deceit, and nailed it to the cross. He went to hell itself, to the very depths of the black cathedral of humanity, and began the arduous task of cleaning it out. Victory was declared; all previous tenants were cleared out. What’s left now is for the inhabitants of the cathedral to join in the work of setting it back to its original garden glory.
This is the work of the inward journey. We, together with our victorious Christ, labour to stack broken stones one on top of another and wheel them out to be discarded. We wash blood off our flagstones. We sweep out the cobwebs of our deepest, darkest corners. We knock down the walls that we bricked up over the gouges wrought by pain, grief, and trauma. We clean house with Christ’s scarred body at our side, his pierced hands assisting us along the way.
See, the cathedral contains the vastness of the human soul. There is much within that I have not discovered, much that I have hidden away and will rediscover, and much that I hesitate to uncover at all. There is a labyrinth deep within which slowly winds to the very center where the Father and I are one. There is a library, a stronghold of memories, some with stiff spines and dusty covers, others so well-read that they nearly fall to dust in my hands. There is a monster, deep within, that I fear sometimes and do not wish to let out, but at other times, we are friends. There are barred vestibules that I dare not venture into for fear its complexity might sweep me away. There are gargoyles, too, and various ornamentation sprinkled about, collected from the snapshots of my life.
But I venture in anyway, bit by bit, clearing one room at a time and making it habitable for the glory of God to dwell. It’s not a matter of being perfect or even being enough; it is a journey of healing performed together—with Christ and, ideally, with trusted friends.
You might tire of this metaphor of the cathedral. I speak in metaphors because I must. The inward journey has no policies, no five-step process to get from A to B. It is a hard and dangerous journey, but one that we do not do alone, for the one who does it with us has already gone before us. I mean Christ, of course, but also your spiritual friends and mentors if you have them.
The entire point of this inward journey is this: We can only love others as much as we love ourselves. Didn’t Christ say this? “Love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matt 22:39) If we cannot accept Christ’s love for us, then we are unable to look at another person and accept his love for them. We are hardest on ourselves, I think. If this is untrue, then we are blindest to ourselves. When we truly see ourselves with all our warts and we also see the deepest love of Christ for us, warts and all, we cannot help but extend the very same shameless love to every other warty human being.
Paul understood this, but wrestled with it, agonizing over the old man that still wrestled within him while the new man was born:
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Rom 7:15-20)
We are a new creation, but the patterns of sin that we have adopted to survive in this world are difficult to break. We all bear wounds. We have all created mechanisms of defense and coping to help us through this messy world. We’ve built up layers of defense: walls ten feet thick with barbed gates and armed archers at the ready with hot oil and tar. Our cathedrals have begun to resemble fortresses instead of the holy places that they are. But we were first created good, and the entire mission of our God is to restore his creation to goodness—and that includes our deepest inward parts.
What other metaphors might be used? The heart is like a child who simply longs to be loved, seen, and accepted. Some of the most powerful experiences I have had have involved imagining myself as child-Katelyn in my mind’s eye and seeing her need in a way that she felt was never seen. To look at oneself as a child and, instead of berating oneself for all her shortcomings, to welcome her with open arms because now, as an adult, you can see that all she wanted was to know that she had a place with you always. That she is accepted just as she is. That she is loved beyond measure.
The heart is like a seed that must be buried in the deep for it to flourish and grow. It needs the dark and damp of the soil; these are the nutrients that will make it strong and healthy. It needs a little wind and turbulence, or it will be limp and weak. It needs the touch of a pollinator who spreads love from one flower to another for it to produce a blossom.
I still like the cathedral best. Whatever metaphor you think of when you think of your inmost self, consider how you speak of it—is it dark and cold? Damp? Warm and brightly lit? Where are the places that you keep hidden, and why? Which corners do you avoid and divert others’ attention from?
Christ is not afraid of the darkness. He went there, headfirst. He took it on as a cloak and slept in it for three days. He is not afraid of what monsters lurk within you (and some of our monsters are sly and insidious indeed). Sometimes they even mask themselves as spiritual things such as morality, piety, busyness, and doing many things for God, as if we could do a single thing for God, who did all things for us. I don’t mean that in a humanist way, but to emphasize God’s incredibly lavish grace and love given to us for no other reason than that he desires to do so.
Bit by bit, with the one who loves us best, we uncover the shining white flagstones underneath the grime. We find treasures long-forgotten in the darkness. We clear out old paths, knock away plastered hallways that covered less-desired corners, and restore the shattered stained glass pieces to shine once more.
One day, perhaps, we will be a gleaming white cathedral resembling the best of Narnia; one day, the Presence of the Holy will permeate it so completely that there is no removing it. He lives within us, and we are fully human as we were created to be. The glory of God dwells within, and there is no more Sun.
Photo by Chad Greiter on Unsplash
