My other highlight from the Royal Wedding was the trees that were brought into the nave of Westminster Abbey. It wasn’t just that they beautified the interior of the Abbey, like an oversized bunch of carefully arranged flowers; it was the magical sense they created that by entering into this building you were actually going out into another completely different world.
I’ve always loved this kind of illusion. It demonstrates how going inside can sometimes take you outside; how fixing your glance on something small can sometimes make your vision much broader. It’s like a metaphor for the power of the imagination itself, which uses something ordinary to transport you somewhere extraordinary. The very act of reading, for example – so still, so stationary, so solitary – is to float up into another world, or fall down into a rabbit-hole of adventure.
The trees in Westminster Abbey made me think of one of my favourite childhood books, Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, where the inner walls of Max’s bedroom are transformed into the treescape of a terrifying jungle. And the wallpaper in David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth that turned his sitting room into an autumnal forest. And Lucy clambering through the wardrobe as the coats turned into leaves and branches and the darkness opened out into the forest snow of Narnia. And Dr Who stepping into the Tardis.
My favourite example of this kind of imaginative inversion is St Francis of Assisi’s Portiuncula. This is the little medieval chapel that once sat in the forest in the plain below Assisi. But they cut down the trees and built an enormous basilica over the entire chapel. So now you leave the streets, walk into the Church of St Mary of the Angels, and instead of being ‘inside’ you are transported ‘outside’ to the forest glade surrounding the chapel. Every time I have been there I have been struck with child-like wonder.
I must have been one of the few (the only?) who didn’t like the trees in Westminster Abbey at all. I thought they looked totally out of place and obscured and diffused the elegant, clean soaring pillars that I assume the architect wanted them to be! Harumph!
What a wonderful comparison between the books we loved in childhood and the religious buildings we love today!
More great posts! I always found the Narnia wardrobe idea very magical. I had an adult experience of this; the inside of a week in the enclosure of Tyburn Convent in 2008 – one of the greatest single blessings of my adult life. I was awe-struck simply to pass through the door…..and then the prayerful world of those Sisters, each living radically with Christ, and in such continuous worship and praise …. I didn’t want to leave….but my place is in the world. But it was as impactful as I imagine ‘near death’ experiences are; a thorough affirmation of all the best perspectives I had ever glimpsed, with much more added besides. God bless those Sisters and their beautiful vocations.
I thought the cart-wheeling verger summed up the joy of that wedding service!
The beauty of the trees, I thought transported the Cathedral from, man and his expression of beauty and worship, (the Cathedral) towards God, into Gods fully dimensional expression of beauty and creation, towards us. The fullness of the vibrant green perfectly alive, though organic, breath of the trees, filled the church with a softness from God which so often Human’s overlook.
I believe the magical portals that deliver us from the mundane into the miraculous can only be seen when one puts those specs on. That’s if they are no already inbuilt.