A Grizzly in the Mail and Other Adventures in American History

14. The Cathedral and the Cemetery

14 THE CATHEDRAL AND THE CEMETERY When these acorns that are falling At our feet are oaks overshadowing Our children in a remote century, this mute green bank will be full of history —Ralph Waldo Emerson at the consecration of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery Looking back on that colorless December day, I wonder what it was that pulled me to Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. The Lewis and Clark exhibition was moving on, and so was I. My three-year job had ended and my search for a new position had begun in earnest. The East Coast beckoned me to return to the familiar. I had traveled to Philadelphia several times that fall to train staff at the exhibition’s next venue, the Academy of Natural Sciences. I was doing what I could to help ensure the exhibition’s success in Philadelphia. But the dreary day that I visited the cemetery was decision day—a job 174 The Cathedral and the Cemetery offer was on the table and my thoughts weighed me down. I ended up visiting two places that had brought me serenity during my years in St. Louis: the cemetery and, before that, a cathedral. History in Churches The Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, a huge green-domed, twotowered Romanesque structure, sits on Lindell Boulevard west of downtown. Inside its massive oak doors eighty-three thousand feet of brightly colored mosaics draw the eyes upward. Whereas some cathedrals tell stories in their stained glass windows, this cathedral uses tiles. It boasts one of the world’s largest collections of mosaics. Every dome, soffit, arch, pendentive, and lunette is covered with glass tiles or tesserae of over seven thousand colors. Here approximately 41.5 million brilliant tiles tell stories from the history of the Catholic Church in America and in St. Louis, along with stories of the Christian faith. Gazing up, a visitor sees images of America’s saints and martyrs, milestones in the Catholic Church’s presence in St. Louis, and the early frontier mission activities of fathers Jacques Marquette and Pierre-Jean De Smet. The story of the desegregation of the city’s parochial schools sits alongside the blue seal of the city of St. Louis, with its Mississippi River steamboat. The mosaics and gleaming marble floors and columns of the cathedral never ceased to lift my spirits and encouraged me to ponder higher callings. So I returned for perhaps one last visit to the place that had served as a spiritual refuge. Historical churches reveal a great deal about both their members and their community. My friend Jay has a special affinity for them and over the years, on our travels together, I’ve been to countless historical churches. The summer I lived in Williamsburg we’d go on long bicycle rides on Saturdays. These adventures often included a visit to a Colonial brick church. The Church of England, official church of the Virginia colony, maintained many small parish churches that still dot the countryside. One I particularly liked, Ware Church, sits in Gloucester, Virginia. Founded in 1680, the present The Cathedral and the Cemetery 175 building was erected between 1690 and 1713. Its simple yet elegant rectangular shape demonstrates the craftsmanship of both local and English artisans. The bricks, placed in a Flemish-bond pattern, show the wear of centuries. Its classic Georgian symmetry includes pediment doors and Palladian windows. A moss-covered brick wall surrounds the building and the churchyard includes graves with markers that date to the early eighteenth century. Many cities in America boast a wealth of historic churches and synagogues in various states of decline. Certainly the old Eastern cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston feature an amazing number of these structures. As the populations of America’s inner cities ebb and flow, the state of the old church buildings also changes. One haunting church sits in splendid isolation surrounded by blighted neighborhoods in northern Philadelphia. On one bike ride with Jay we took a detour to see a project his church had embarked upon. We jumped a low fence and walked into another place and time. St. James-the-Less parish church stands amid a sea of stone crosses, a copy of an English country church built in the thirteenth century. Construction began in 1846 and the vestry hoped the church would serve as an oasis for both the wealthy and the working classes. This vision...