The Cathedral That Rose From Rubble

In 1945, the people of Coventry, England, stood in the skeletal remains of their beloved St. Michael's Cathedral, reduced to blackened walls and open sky by German incendiary bombs five years earlier. The medieval stained glass was gone. The carved oak choir stalls were ash. Some wept openly, remembering what had been.

When architect Basil Spence unveiled his design for a new cathedral in 1951, critics were ruthless. It looked nothing like the old one. Where was the Gothic grandeur? The flying buttresses? The ancient stone? Provost Richard Howard had already set the tone years before, when he inscribed the words "Father Forgive" behind the altar of ruins — not "Father Forgive Them," but simply "Father Forgive," implicating everyone, including himself.

When the new Coventry Cathedral was consecrated in 1962, something remarkable had happened. The building had become a global symbol of reconciliation. Its tapestry of Christ, its baptistry window blazing with sunlight, its Chapel of Unity welcoming every Christian tradition — these carried a glory the medieval cathedral never possessed. The old building had been beautiful. The new one carried peace.

The returning exiles in Jerusalem looked at their modest second temple and mourned what Solomon had built. But the Lord Almighty spoke through Haggai: "The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house. And in this place I will grant peace." God does not measure glory by gilding. He measures it by His presence — and His shalom.