Under One Heaven

The Rector returns from sabbatical on St Giles Day. Here he reflects on his time away and the insights of his journey.

I am so pleased to return to you at St. Giles and as I arrive back I must say a huge thank you to Lesley, to Phillip, to Wil, to Chris and to our Churchwardens for keeping the “show on the road” in my absence. I have returned with a new enthusiasm and focus for all that is to come. I really am very grateful for my time away and I look forward to sharing with you all many more years of ministry and discovery of what God has in store for each one of us.

I hope to see as many of you as possible for our Patronal Festival on Sunday 7 September. This is a time to give thanks for St. Giles Church and our shared community. Please bring your families and friends with you. I also have an important announcement to make, which would be good for you to hear first-hand...

I didn’t really know how I would feel, arriving back in London after two months as a travelling pilgrim. The sudden appearance of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral after passing Bank station came as special moment of connection, not only with a place, but with a theme which had emerged on my travels – the dome of the heavens.

Domes have formed part of the religious architecture of the East and West for thousands of years and they were a familiar companion on my journey. I began outside the vast gold domed cathedral of Tbilisi, I arrived in Istanbul (a city of many domes) about a month later having cycled into Turkey and along the Black Sea. From there I went off into Bulgaria, Romania, Hungry, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands and finally via ferry to Harwich and then London. Around three thousand miles, twelve flat tyres (I stopped counting at twelve), hundreds of cups of coffee and more bread than is strictly healthy. I lost count of the number of domes!

The dome has been central to much of the architecture inherited from the Roman world. Until the conversion of Constantine, Christians met in a mixture of private houses and other spaces; the idea of dedicated buildings for worship didn’t really exist until the 4th century. But after the enfranchisement of Christianity and the huge social and economic freedom that came with it, there was a desire to set apart physical spaces for Christian worship and, unsurprisingly, these adopted the form of important Roman buildings. Indeed many Roman temples were simply re-appropriated for Christian use (the Pantheon in Rome is a good example). Our own church represents a much later continuation of this tradition.

The advancement of Christianity into these spaces sought to affirm that there was only one Triune God of the heavens, under whom we live and move and have our being. These soaring spheres represented to the onlooker the dome of the heavens and invited them into a relationship with the divinities who dwelt therein.

I encountered perhaps the most famous and effective building specifically constructed to communicate these themes at the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Completed in 537AD, it included the first pendentive dome, a massive achievement which not only offered a blueprint for future churches but, having been converted into a Mosque after the fall of Constantinople, shaped the architecture of Islamic worship spaces as well.

While it is hard to pull out a unifying theme from my time away,  these domes of the East and of the West yielded a simple one: that we are all under the heavens. It’s an obvious thing to say, but then we’re probably all guilty of focusing too much on the here and now, the material environment around us and our desire to change and profit from it. To gaze upwards into the vastness of the cosmos is to remind ourselves of a different, biblical vision of heaven and earth.

I’ve always liked the description of the heavens as a tent over the world, the stars simply holes in the canvas allowing the light of God to shine through. It profits humans to be humbled under the vastness of the God of the heavens, his love and his reach into the life of the world through the Son and the Holy Spirit. The greatest thing we can come to know is God and his love for us.

This is not a ground-breaking thought, I admit: ‘Vicar goes on sabbatical and arrives home to affirm that God is important’. There were other thoughts of course, some of which I daresay will come out in sermons over the next year, but the overarching thought of my time away was comfortingly simple: God is in the heavens, and we are all under him.

With every blessing, Tom