Life in the Cathedral

Dear Friends,

There is more alabaster in our Los Angeles Cathedral - Mary Queen of the Angels - than in any other building in the world. Or so I was told by a Jesuit friend as I stood in the Cathedral plaza on Monday evening, preparing to enter the church for the annual Chrism Mass. Inside, the presence of people - live human bodies gathered for this event for the first time in two years - brought the building to life.

And so did the alabaster. As the cathedral’s version of stained glass, this amazing mineral filters the light, gently binding outside and inside, earth, rock, and soil becoming the medium for heavenly light. And that light falls on an interior of angles, slopes, and surprising intersections, a place of unexpected and odd dimensions, offering multiple points of view - like the world outside, but somehow transformed. And embedded within all this, set off by the alabaster around it, thrust out in stone from the wall behind the altar, the sign of the cross.

The priest next to me was named Ethan and he was excited to tell me that he had recently been to Assisi and that he’d prayed at the churches where St. Francis and St. Clare are buried. I couldn’t help but think that the design of the walls all around us evoked the spirit of those great saints. Earthy (brown robed?), in their own way humble, too, planted in the city’s center as a place of translucence.    

“The church is alive, because Christ is alive,” said the Archbishop. In procession to Easter Sunday, I look to the cross and the light that surrounds it. It comes into the sharpness and broken lines of my world, our world. Ever so softly in the alabaster I hear stone cry out. I see light rolling the stone away.  

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor