Recently I was in upstate New York in the beautiful Finger Lakes region with my whole family to attend my niece’s wedding in lovely Skaneateles. It was wonderful to be with family for this joyous celebration. After the wedding weekend my brother kindly drove us down to Ithaca, where I had attended graduate school at Cornell University and met and married my wife Sabine thirty years earlier in the nearby village of Dryden. As part of walking around Cornell’s incomparable campus, on a warm sunny day we entered the cool refuge of Sage Chapel.
Courtyard of Sage Chapel. Photo by Elleanor Hyland.
While I had attended services in this Victorian gem from time to time as a student, much more often for me it was a place of quiet sanctuary and private prayer and meditation, with its lovely mosaics and amazing stained glass windows. Whether on a warm day such as this August afternoon or a bitingly cold winter’s morning, it had never failed to soothe my spirit, an ecumenical celebration in stone and glass and marble of faith, learning and charity. It was for me also an expression of something that I had also come to love very deeply, the medieval aesthetic expressed so beautifully in Victorian and Edwardian art.
Sage chapel. Interior mosaics and windows. Photo by Eleanor Hyland.
I have written before, and it never ceases to amaze me, how ecclesiastical art and decoration always play such an important part in one’s formation. How important it is to simply sit and be immersed over time in the presence of such beauty, and to allow the Spirit to form one, bringing inspiration and consolation, and instilling dreams.
This time in Sage Chapel, after years away, I was reminded of something I had not thought of in a long time. In one area of the chapel, nestled next to one another in a pairing which I have to think is very uncommon if not unique to Sage, were two lovely windows of the Venerable Bede and Erasmus. I was transfixed as I gazed upon them, and asked my daughter to take a photo of me in front of them.
In front of the windows of Erasmus and Bede, Sage chapel. Photo by Eleanor Hyland.
It struck me like a powerful and poignant thunderbolt how important and formative this combination had been to me, as both a scholar, historian, teacher, and, in my best moments, I hope, a Christian humanist. From the eighth-century Bede comes my first academic love, and enduring spiritual interest, in the early medieval and in particular Anglo-Saxon church, the patristic Church of the North. Bede, his love of church history, liturgical prayer, hagiography, biblical exegesis, all are such a part of me. And Erasmus in the sixteenth century, his love of antiquity, his Christian humanism, his irenical attitudes in theology, the seeking of common ground, and also his deep sadness over the painful divisions in Christendom happening in his time. Both were deeply committed in their own ways and times to education and Christian humanism. One stands at the beginning of the middle ages, one at the end. How amazing, I thought, as I stood there, in the book I am finishing now on a sixteenth century abbot, that both figure in it as influences on him. And I myself am in many ways, in some strange and deeply enigmatic way, an amalgam of the two.
I could go on and on, but suffice to say that it is profoundly important, the art and environment we immerse ourselves in, the settings where we place ourselves to ponder and to pray. I have been the beneficiary of many such places, and for all of them I am grateful, not least for the lovely, cool darkness of Cornell’s Sage Chapel and its inspiring glass, mosaics, and marble.
Festina Lente 