In the Middle Ages, cathedrals often took hundreds of years to build. Slowly stretching skyward, they consumed the passionate skill and, indeed, the entire lives of generations of carpenters and stonecutters. The building of a cathedral, after all, is mystical work. It requires men to celebrate the glory of God in stone, with each individual stone serving as the unique calling card of the mason who finishes it and sets it in place. The architectural reach toward heaven drove men to build ever higher, to put in larger and larger windows, to shape cathedrals of lighter and lighter stone until, at places like Beauvais and Amiens, cathedrals seemed to be made of wind and glass.
This arcane form of prayer has been little known in the New World. But now, after a 38-year delay, a dozen hand-picked local apprentices under the direction of an English master builder are hard at work trying to finish Manhattan's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. They are building a gallery and two towers above the western facade, appropriately named for Sts. Peter and Paul.
The man in charge is James Robert Bambridge, 53. He earned his rank of master builder by finishing the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, an effort that took ten years, from 1967 to 1977. Before that, Bambridge was called in to restore the Houses of Parliament after World War II.
In a time obsessed with speed, when pride in workmanship is in decline, the very existence of such a project is both a challenge and a contradiction in terms. To build the 153-ft. towers, fully 24,000 pieces of Indiana limestone must be cut and individually shaped. The project is expected to take 30 years, and real construction cannot even begin until 7,200 stones have been finished. "We are working just as they did in medieval times," says Bambridge. "In the 18 months since work began we have completed over 1,000 stones."
Financing of the work has moved at a similar pace. When the project began, the cathedral had $5 million in the kitty, enough for five years' work. But there has been much anguish over whether the estimated $21 million needed to finish the job wouldn't be better spent on the poor. "I am a people person, not a stone person," admits the Right Rev. Paul Moore Jr., the cathedral's liberal bishop. "At first I was opposed. But the public response has been overwhelming." Moore is now a strong partisan of the project.