York Minster

The most important thing on my agenda for York was the Minster. I purposely went around the rest of the city before letting myself arrive at this beautiful cathedral that dominates the city skyline - where ever you are, you see the towering church above you. I am being only slightly melodramatic! I spent three hours inside the church and then climbed the walls to look around the exterior. There are so many highlights that it is difficult to name one as a favorite but if pressed I go with the stained glass.

You don't really get the impact of the space until you are fully inside, standing under the tower. From the entrance you have to walk forward to see the long, tall nave. It is not until you do this that your senses jump at the space before you - it is enormous. This is the widest nave in England at 196 feet high, 525 feet long, and 250 wide. More than the space (because if I am truly honest there are many other great churches that I have been able to visit that have given me a greater sense of awe and inspiration - for those of you now wondering... my favorites are Aya Sophia in Istanbul and St. Paul's in London with the Duomo in Florence in third) it is the sense of history that interests me about this building. There are so many layers of history on this site starting with the Romans who built a fortress in AD71 and a church in AD627. The Romans site was located almost perpendicular to the current church because it was designed to follow the lay of the land. The Normans were next and they altered the arrangement of the church to follow the principles of Christianity with the church lined to the east and west. The current medieval building was completed in 1472 and was essentially built around the Norman church and some additions have been made since that time. All of this was visible in the undercroft of the church. Several of the stone foundations remain from earlier churches as does a Roman wall painting.

My favorite decorative portions of the church were the stained glass windows (of which there are 128), the Chapter House, and the Quire Screen. The stained glass is among the oldest in the world yet it retains its beauty as though new. I was very lucky to join in with a guided tour of the Minster and the guide pointed out fun details like the medieval cartoon strip in one of the glass windows. It shows a rooster performing a funeral service for a monkey! The window above is the West Window called the "Heart of Yorkshire" because of the heart that can be seen in the stonework at the top of the window.
This is not the best picture to show you the beautiful Chapter House. For that I offer the full slide show of pictures to the right. However, this is your moral lesson of the day. All around the room are carvings of people, animals (including more monkeys) and vegetation. There is also a very rare carving of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus that somehow survived the Reformation in England. Here we have a woman whose face is being eaten out by a bird. The Minster guidebook tells you that this woman is a gossip. Lesson learned!One of the most visually stunning items in the Minster is the Quire Screen. This screen was designed to separate the uneducated people from the center of worship that was reserved for the priests. This particular screen has carvings of the first fifteen kings of England beginning with William the Conqueror. This is a detail of one of the kings. Apparently two different artisans did these carvings because every other one looks like this: thin with a detailed face. The others are fat with round faces. As my guide put it, "No one actually knows what the king looked like."

This is still a church used for worship. This was reinforced as everyone was called to stop together for prayer at 11.00 and a service was held at 12.00. It was designed to inspire awe in a great God, to tell the stories of His works in glass, in paintings on the walls and in the statues. Its size was to draw us upward, upward to God.