very reverend canon richard sewell

Nathan the Prophet and Zadok and Abiathar the Priests

“Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet: praise Him with the psaltery and harp.” Psalm 150:3

Spanish-Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava has designed over 40 bridges – Dublin has two (James Joyce and Samuel Beckett) – but The Chords Bridge was the first to carry both trains and pedestrians. Completed in 2008, it arches over a traffic junction next to Barchana Architects’ Yitzhak Navon Railway Station in northwest Jerusalem. A 188 metre high cantilevered pylon provides mathematically rigorous support for 66 steel cables which hold the bridge’s 30 metre long deck. Santiago relates, “The Jerusalem light rail train bridge project started with the idea that we had to create a very light and very transparent bridge which would span a major new plaza at the entry to Jerusalem.” His work is a stimulating addition to the cityscape, capturing the spirit of the age montaged onto an indigo sky. The Chords Bridge is clad in Jerusalem stone which accords with the architect’s penchant for pale. “Calatrava’s geminal iconoclastic experiments with structure and movement spring out of a long historical tradition,” shares Alexander Tzonis in Santiago Calatrava: The Poetics of Movement (1999). Make that implied, potential and physical movement.

“The architect compares the final result with the form of a musical instrument such as a harp with its cables as strings,” explains Philip Jodidio in Calatrava Complete Works 1979 to Today (2018), “an apt metaphor in the City of David. According to Moshe Safdie in Jerusalem The Future of the Past (1984), “What Bach did with the fugue, we must learn to do in architecture. I feel architecture can, however rarely, move us as deeply as music can.” Sometimes architecture really is frozen music, accompanied by a light cordial on the rocks. At the Cathedral of St George the Martyr, the Mother Church of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, The Very Reverend Canon Richard Sewell hoped, “We might hear the chord that calls us up to dance!” Or the voice of harpers harping with their harps. Sourires d’été en musique.

“You strum away on your harps like David and improvise on musical instruments.” Amos 6:5

(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv)

Chartered Waters

“No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.” I Corinthians 2:7

The past is a foreign country; sometimes so is the present. Ah, the orgastic present. An amplification of sorts, a reawakening of existential and pragmatic reality. Golden crowns glisten upon the pent up jasper sea off the Mediterranean coast, glowing with the creative energy of God. Mighteous waves beat in from the allure of azure horizons, ethereal expanses of shining sand at once quotidian and crystalline. And then there is the sunlight, as efficacious as an Evensong prayer. Igniting unforeseen possibilities, purveying happenstance; renewals of experience apart, we remain unacquainted with neo and pseudo.

In What Are We Doing Here? (2000), Marilynne Robinson originates, “And yet the beautiful persists, and so do eloquence and depth of thought, and they belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we have of what is possible in us.” Keeping it surreal, through an interrogation of the Rogation, doxological precepts acknowledged, spangled heavens approaching, Tel Aviv stretches forth in vital immediacy under an ever-luring sky. Encountering beauty through the iridescent glow of an evanescent world, sidestepping the modish while fleeing material status, in a reordering of hierarchies, we sew the tapestry of our simple joyful lives.

Marilynne Robinson again: “We have looked into Melvillean nurseries, and glimpsed the births of stars that came into being many millions of years ago, an odd privilege of our relation to space and time. Properly speaking, we are the stuff of myth.” Our late afternoon stroll along Frishman Beach after dropping down from Independence Park (a hilltop fairy land of three hectares) proves singular and providential, echoing a strange efficacy, a special instance of the matrix of being. She muses, “There is something irreducibly thrilling about the universe … a reality whose astonishments we can never exhaust.” The Very Reverend Canon Richard Sewell told the congregation at St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, “The universe is stranger than we realise and is stranger than we can realise.” Wonders unto many, we are magnified and tainted by elegiac projection, poignancy and beauty. Today is the beginning of always.

“He told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables.” Mark 4: 11 (Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).

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