A Meditation on Cathedral Time
Building something that endures requires a different sense of time. This meditation guides you to cultivate a "cathedral mindset"—the ability to hold a vision that extends far beyond immediate results, finding patience and clarity in the long, deliberate process of creation.
The Tyranny of the Immediate
Find a quiet space. Allow your body to settle. Notice the pace of your own mind. The hum of thoughts, the list of tasks, the sense of a clock ticking somewhere just out of sight. This is the rhythm of our world. A rhythm of immediacy, of quarterly reports and next-day delivery. We are trained to measure our lives in ever-shrinking units of time. We have, as one writer put it, fractionated our days to an absurd degree, and in doing so, we have lost the ability to see our lives in their fullness. We are pressured to build quickly, to show results now, to answer the email *now*. But what if the most important work of your life cannot be built this way? What if the things that truly matter—a legacy, a community, a profound change in the world or in yourself—require a different kind of time altogether? Let’s call it Cathedral Time.
The Rock Pile and the Vision
The concept of Cathedral Thinking comes to us from the Middle Ages, a time we rush to call "dark" while overlooking the sheer audacity of its vision. When a community decided to build a cathedral, they knew it would not be finished in a decade, or even a lifetime. It was a project that spanned generations. The stonemason who laid the foundation would never see the spire touch the clouds. The artist who designed the great rose window would never stand in its colored light. They were not building for themselves. They were building for their great-grandchildren, and for a vision that felt more real than their own fleeting lives. There’s a French proverb that says, "A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single person contemplates it, bearing within them the image of a cathedral." Right now, in your own life, you are standing before a pile of rocks. The daily efforts, the small habits, the difficult conversations, the persistent hopes. It is so easy to see it all as just a messy pile of stones. It is easy to become discouraged by the sheer effort of it all, by the lack of immediate progress. But I invite you now to look at that pile differently. I invite you to contemplate it, and to let the image of a cathedral rise within you. What is the great work you are building? What is the vision that, if you truly held it, would transform the scattered rocks of your life into the foundation of something sacred? It does not need to be a literal building. It could be a family, healed and whole. It could be a body of knowledge, patiently acquired and shared. It could be a more just and compassionate community. Take a moment. Let that vision come. See it. Feel its weight, its importance. This is your cathedral.