St. Peter’s

If you look carefully at this photograph of St. Peter’s Church, Bristol’s first church, who’s foundations date to 1106, with most of the church built in the 1400s, you’ll notice 3 things:

• It is built of random fieldstone, not carefully quarried uniform building blocks chiseled from limestone or granite; random stones in different shapes and sizes and colours, painstakingly laid as rubblestone walls by masons skilled in their craft and able, using lime mortar as their binding material, to erect flawless walls from the most irregular of materials. The result is beautifully, flagrantly, joyously random, yet architecturally perfect.
• It has no roof.
• It has no windows.

When the Luftwaffe sortied over Bristol to destroy the munitions factories, and the fighter engine works, and the countless other war industry plants that were here, long and grueling bombing runs that required skill and ingenuity on their part, some of their 500 pound incendiary bombs fell on the church, crashing through the ancient slate roof and setting the interior ablaze.

Everything within caught fire, the old dry oak pews likely crackling into flame first, like so much kindling, the elaborately carved walnut choir stalls licking into flame next, and the massive oak supporting pillars and beams catching last, until the entire roof collapsed inwards and everything burned with the fury and the roar of a crematorium furnace, reducing the interior to ashes.

The intense heat blew out or melted all the stained glass windows, in every wall.

What remains today, in the middle of Castle Park, one of the oldest parts of Bristol, are those charred ancient stone walls, pierced by the delicate iron fretwork of the windows that once held the stained glass, and locked iron gates where the heavily carved wooden doors once swung open to welcome the congregation.

You can look inside: it’s open to the endless blue of a summer sky, the drenching rains of spring and fall, the bitter gales of winter.

A tree now grows where the altar once stood, moss creeps along shaded corners where walls and stone floor meet, ivy playfully curls through the spot where choirs once sang carols and hymns at every Holiday in the Church calendar.

Nature is establishing itself in this once resolutely Christian environment in a gloriously pagan manifestation of religion; the unstoppable power of trees and flowers and greenery and every kind of flying thing creating a church exploding now with life.

The spiritual purpose of the building seems almost entirely intact, even as so little remains.

Memorial? Scar?

Yes.

And a deadening reminder, as I scan the news, of how dismally little we’ve learned.