Sermon of Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury during the Church of England's General Synod
At Coventry Cathedral, when you stand behind the high altar, you look down a huge distance to the west end of the cathedral - and there is nothing to see there, because it is glass. The eye is drawn through it into the ruins of the old cathedral, that great symbol of death and destruction, and through that into the city beyond.
When you go round the chapels, and you start in the Chapel of Unity, the glass - which is stained glass there - keeps your eye inwards on the centre. But when you get to the other end of the cathedral, to the Chapel of Industry, it’s plain glass, and you cannot only look inwards: your eye is drawn outwards.
At the heart of Spence’s great vision of that cathedral is something that draws us outwards, because we are at our best - we are only, in fact, of any worth - when we are outward-looking and committed deeply to reaching out in love to the world around us
The week before last I was in the city of Bor in the South Sudan, with my wife and with one of my colleagues. We arrived by Mission and Aviation Fellowship’s (MAF) small plane and drove through a deserted town with bodies, corpses, littering the streets. Corpses who’d been in temperatures of 40 degrees for the past 12 days.
- See more at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5250/archbishop-justins-sermon-at-general-synod#sthash.yvi9N2ys.dpuf