Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral

The annual cost of running Westminster Abbey is about 9 million pounds. (I was really hoping it would be over 9,000. Internet memes, anyone? No? No? OK.) That's why you have to pay 15 pounds to walk around and take pictures. It's the same kind of scenario for St. Paul's. Both places are free if you're just going in for a service or to pray, but that means that you can't walk around and take pictures. All this is fine by me. After all, they're primarily houses of worship and they don't charge people to come inside for a service.

So that's why you don't have a billion pictures of these two places from me, and also why my London album on Facebook is much smaller than any of the others. I get a little picture happy inside churches. It was kinda liberating, just walking into these two places and not feeling like I had to document every statue along the way. Which makes me feel like I've been doing this wrong.

So when I go in for services in a cathedral or a church or wherever, I tend to focus on getting to my seat. I don't know if this is because I'm actually excited for the service or if it's because I've adapted the "if I look like I know where I'm going, they'll think I belong:" strategy subconsiously. I motored into Westminster for the evensong service and slide into a chair beside the choir stalls without waiting for the direction of the ushers. I looked around and noticed that the vent beside me was used for the heating of the choir stall and A COLD DRAFT IS THEREFORE NORMAL. There was a sign. Apparently people had asked. I also talked for a second to the lady beside me who didn't speak or understand English particularly well. I knew where she's been and I wished I could help. But, as I always do when presented with paper and books, I chickened out and stopped looking around and read about the service.

The evenson service is particular to the Anglican communion. (I imagine Richard Attenborough reading this in a voiceover vis-a-vis an animal documentary.) It's a bit like a vespers service done every day. There's a gloria, a magnificant, a nunc dimittis (the prayer of Simeon, one of my favorites) and a time of prayer, plus an anthem by the choir. The one in St. Paul's was on a feast day, the one for Mary's parents, St. Joachim and St. Anne, so there was a sermon. You can have no idea how abusively wonderful it was to understand every word in the two services I attended.

I sat through the organ postlude at Westminster, wondering if the visiting choir brought their own organist, and wandered out much more slowly than I wandered in. I balked for a second on my way out the door in the choir screen, amazed to have stumbled on the grave of Sir Isaac Newton. I looked in the floor and saw a memorial to PJ Dirac, and began to study the place around me, finding Ernest Rutherford and JJ Thomson. I love finding these physical memorials to people that I've read so much about. I would have wandered over to the poet's corner but they walked us out of the Abbey. After all, the service was over.

The same kind of thing happened at St. Paul's, being in a church only as a place of worship. I'd walk around the outside of the building with that Feed the Birds song stuck in my head and when I finally went in for the service, I hardly remarked the decor of the place around me. I walked purposefully up to the man handing out the books for the service and found a seat and began studying the order of service and the hymns we would sing. When I finally allowed myself to relax and look around, staring up again and again into the dome and around to see the statues and symbols around me, I almost shrugged it off. It was nice, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before, and anyway, I was here for the service.

Now, I'm a little astounded at that attitude. St. Paul's Cathedral in London is nice, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before? And I've heard bells and I've listened to services and I've stared at arches and columns and domes and apses and I've visited and I've thought and I've been through this all before. But shouldn't each time I see a place be something new? There's nothing like St. Paul's. There's nothing like Westminster. But there are so many things so similar that it really takes a royal wedding to set the places apart.

So walk inside. Be amazed. Really, look around and be astounded at the things people have built and made. Realize you're paying for the history that's being preserved here and that history is no small thing to preserve. I want the people of our future to see these places as well. But realize, just as there are many famous people who have achieved wonderful things whose nameswe stumble over or confuse or forget, there are many famous places that we will mix up and each will eventually lose their disctinction in the busy filing cabinets of our minds.

And though this fate of the forgotten seems like a horrible fate, I don't think you have to take the worst of ideas from it. After all, isn't it better to have such an abundance of beauty that we confuse where we first saw it than to have an absolute certainty of a memory of the only place that beauty exists?