On the night of November 14, 1940, the towering 13th-century Coventry Cathedral was turned to smoldering rubble. As part of World War II air raids, 515 German bomber planes had flown over the city of Coventry. Bombs and fires not only destroyed the cathedral; they leveled the city center, devastated more than 4,300 homes, and killed at least 568 people.
Imagine how the people of Coventry must have felt. Grief. Terror. Rage. Despair. If the heart of the city was full of hatred for the enemies who had done this to them, we’d all understand.
My guess is that the people of Coventry felt all of those feelings because they were human beings.
What makes this story worth telling is not these feelings that the people must have had — it’s the way that the Coventry Cathedral community chose to live in response to this violence.
In the days immediately following the bombing, the head priest, Rev. Richard Howard, took a piece of chalk and wrote these words on one of the walls left standing in the midst of the rubble: “Father Forgive.”
Six weeks later, Rev. Howard gave a Christmas Day sermon from the midst of that rubble, and already he cast a vision of reconciliation with the enemy. He preached that once the war was over, they should work with those who had been the enemy “to build a kinder, more Christ Child-like world.”
Rev. Howard lived out his own sermon: two years after the end of the war, he presented a cross made of nails from the ruined cathedral to a church in Germany. It was a symbol of peace and friendship.
From that first gift grew the Community of the Cross of Nails: a formal network of churches, schools, and other organizations committed to the work of reconciliation. Valparaiso University is part of this community: we received a cross made of nails from Coventry Cathedral in 1965, and we use it in worship at the Chapel each Sunday. At Coventry Cathedral, in the preserved ruins, people have gathered at noon every weekday since 1958 to pray the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation. At the Chapel we also frequently recite this litany during Morning Prayer; for the first half of this semester, we’ve been praying it each Thursday.
This past weekend was Community of the Cross of Nails Sunday, when member organizations around the world re-told this story and renewed their commitment to the work of reconciliation and peace-building.
We remember the Coventry story as we are surrounded by our own experiences of violence. The headlines tell us of new tragedies, and public rhetoric is full of vicious images and threats.
Living in this atmosphere, it becomes more important than ever to slow down and ask ourselves: How do we want to live in the midst of all this? What are our values? How will we respond to the world around us?
Prayer:
Father, you formed the human family to live in harmony and peace: we acknowledge before you our divisions, quarrels, hatred, injustices and greed. May your Church demonstrate before the world the power of the Gospel to destroy divisions, so that in Christ Jesus there may be no barriers of wealth or class, age or intellect, race or color, but all may be equally your children, members of one another, and heirs together of your everlasting kingdom. Amen.
– Pastor Kate
Rev. Katherine Museus and Rev. James A. Wetzstein serve as university pastors at the Chapel of the Resurrection at Valparaiso University and take turns writing weekly devotions.
