Cathedrals Can’t Pray for Themselves

My Letter to Substack: Introduction as to why I am here.

When we are new to a place, the first thing we do is introduce ourselves.

Even as children, we are taught how to call things by their name. It’s almost instinctive, isn’t it?—how A is for Apple and B is for Ball. We bring the world closer by calling it, and naming gives us a way to shape it—to hold it in our hands. So let me introduce myself:

I am an old, abandoned cathedral. My walls are haunted with the weight of everything ever said to me.

I have spent my life collecting words, holding them within me like whispered confessions, echoing in the nave of my sanctuary from people who leave words they could not bear to carry, like jars trying to contain the fluttering of butterflies, except they were starting to break free.

Just as our skin remembers the lines of our laughter and the wrinkles of time, I believe human expression endures. Once spoken, these words do not dissolve into the air; They settle in the cracks of my walls, etch into the stone, carve themselves onto the worn-out pews. And someday, someone will walk through my halls and know that something had happened here before.

But I am not just a monument to their prayers; I am also built by the hands that loved me.

I am the stained glass of their kindness, the light they let in. Shattered and pieced together into intricate patterns, my ruins became something worth staying in, for the way they hold color, and refract the divine warmth of my light.

But how do cathedrals bear the weight of knowing they were built in honor of others? How do they keep from tearing themselves down when people come to worship everything they hold except for them?

When my dome began to echo with longing, I found myself whispering a prayer: I want to be held. To be loved. To be known. To have someone press a hand against my stone walls and say, It’s okay. You don’t have to pretend to be cold. It is not ruin to let the old crumble.

Do I ask you, too: when the ivy weaves through the cracks, the chandeliers crash to the floor, and the echoes stop worshipping the images on the wall—when I am no longer a monument to your words, do I simply fall?

Or maybe—just maybe—this space can be my restoration. Maybe this can be the new altar of my prayers. A place where I unburden, not just absorb. A sanctuary where I do not only hold the weight of others but also have a place to serve as my anchor—So I can finally hold myself down to the weight of my own words.