The Morning After Coventry

On November 15, 1940, Provost Richard Howard picked his way through the smoldering ruins of Coventry Cathedral. German bombers had reduced the 600-year-old sanctuary to a skeleton of charred walls and shattered glass. The medieval roof timbers lay in heaps of ash. England's spiritual heart felt torn open.

But Howard did something that morning that no one expected. Standing amid the rubble, he took two charred roof beams and bound them together into a cross. Then he scratched three words into the wall behind the ruined altar: "Father, Forgive." Not "Father, avenge." Not "Father, destroy our enemies." Forgive.

From that act of defiant grace, light began to rise. Workers forged a cross from medieval nails pulled from the wreckage — the Cross of Nails — and it became a symbol not of destruction but of reconciliation. When the new cathedral was consecrated in 1962, architect Basil Spence built it alongside the ruins, so that the broken walls stood as a permanent witness. Today, over two hundred Cross of Nails communities span the globe, from Berlin to Hiroshima, each one dedicated to healing the wounds of hatred.

Isaiah saw this pattern long before Coventry. "Arise, shine, for your light has come," he declared to a people who knew the rubble of exile. The glory of the Lord does not wait for perfect conditions. It rises precisely where the darkness has been deepest — and when it does, the nations come streaming toward the glow.