Sad Tower

I am very glad that the damage from the earthquake in the USA seems to be minor, but immensely sad at the pictures of the National Cathedral with three pinnacles missing. The damage is still being assessed to this building which is set with a strange national mandate.
To an English mind it is an odd project….and one which took many years to grow on me. But it is with great upset that I see these pictures in a place which came to symbolize a sort of brave hope to me.
Not that I agreed with everything, not that I even liked everything when I lived down the road in Northern Virginia,  but that on a National stage and a local city stage the National Cathedral has a unique and strange permission to ask questions and to begin to weave carefully and sometimes tentatively, the story of what faith might yet just mean to the American people.
The tower is just bricks and mortar, hope is a lot stronger..but as another presidential election approaches…a process which too often diminishes humanity and the image of God, I feel a little sad that the broken building says more clearly where we are than where we would hope to be as nations and as a world.