The Nails of Coventry Cathedral

On the morning of November 15, 1940, the people of Coventry, England, emerged from their shelters to find their beloved medieval cathedral reduced to a smoking shell. The Luftwaffe had gutted the sanctuary in a single night of relentless bombing. Provost Richard Howard walked through the smoldering ruins, gathered two charred roof timbers, and bound them into a cross. Then he scratched two words into the sandstone wall behind the altar: "Father Forgive."

He did not write "Father, forgive them." He wrote it without an object — a confession that all sides needed grace.

In the years that followed, Coventry did something Isaiah would have recognized. The congregation took nails from their destroyed cathedral and fashioned them into crosses of reconciliation. They sent those crosses to Dresden, the German city the Allies had firebombed into ash. Former enemies knelt together. The Community of the Cross of Nails grew into a global network spanning over two hundred centers of reconciliation worldwide — from Belfast to Hiroshima, from South Africa to the Middle East.

Coventry took the wreckage of war and reshaped it into an instrument of peace. Nails that once held a roof together were refashioned to hold enemies together. It is the prophet's ancient dream made visible: swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks. And at the center of it all, an invitation that still echoes — "Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord."