A Case of Symmetry

A Case of Symmetry

Continuing along the journey, we finished our time at Durham Cathedral and continued on our Pilgrim’s Way to Whitby Abbey and the monastery of Rievaulx, which at one time was the largest church in England.

One of the things that struck me about the difference between all of them was a case of symmetry.

Durham Cathedral was not built at one time. It was slowly built up in sections, due to funding and labor problems and construction was delayed. The original Norman builders yielded the project to the later English, and following generations completed the original cathedral. Several events such as fires and storms necessitated reconstruction projects in the eleventh and seventeenth centuries in a variety of architectural styles.

For this reason, if you sit exactly in the center of the crossing in the nave at Durham and look in the four directions down the rows of the cathedral, no two sides of the building match. Observing this with an artist’s eye is annoying. Such a massive, beautiful building, with windows and columns soaring upwards, I just wanted it to be perfect in every way, and accepting its flaws and imperfections was a difficult thing for me to do.

On the other hand, both the abbeys at Whitby and Rievaulx were built as single buildings, by single builders, in a single process. Even though both of these grandiose monasteries are now crumbling, the remaining facades are perfectly symmetrical, complementing the levels and arches around them by design and not by accident.

This struck me as important and surprising, as well as astounding that I would find crumbling ruins more glorious than a soaring cathedral, and reminded me that God sees perfection in all things, sees symmetry in all places, even those cast aside by man, and loves them all.

-Jack Wesson