Building Cathedrals Is Good For Your Soul
Dr Vernon Coleman
Our views of life are very short term. Television has taught us to have shorter and shorter attention spans – during the last decade or so the length of the average political sound bite on television has shrunk from a minute or two to around seven seconds.
We used to think of the short term as meaning less than a year, the medium term as meaning between one and five years and of the long term as referring to anything more than five years into the future.
Today, most people think of the short term as being within the next five or ten minutes, the medium term as being within the next week or so and the long term as being, at most, within the next six months.
Everything is done in a hurry. People want instant results. We want to see the results of our labours immediately so that we can get on to the next project.
I think that all this is a terrible mistake. It means that our views of life are gravely limited.
Back in the Middle Ages, when some of the world’s most beautiful cathedrals were being built, people genuinely thought of the long term as referring to a span of several generations.
Work started on Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France, in 1163 and didn’t finish until around 1340 – over 175 years later. In Italy, St Peter’s in Rome was begun in 1506 and not completed until 1615. In Exeter in England the Cathedral Church of St Peter was begun in 1275 and not completed until nearly a century later. Those are by no means exceptional examples.
In those days a craftsman would happily work on a cathedral (or some other grand building) knowing that he would not live to see the building finished. But he would know that his son would carry on his work. And when the son, in turn, grew into his own prime, he knew that his son would continue working on the cathedral.
Three or more generations would contentedly work on a single project. There would be a sense of continuity, of permanence, of being part of something bigger and more important than oneself, and of belonging to something meaningful. That feeling of belonging passed on from father to son and from father to son as the years and decades and centuries went by. A man’s life did not end with his death because he lived on as part of something that he had begun to help create.
This feeling of oneness with future generations was not confined to builders and craftsmen working on large, public buildings.
A century or so ago men routinely planted trees for other men to sit under. Estate owners and gardeners would plant seeds knowing that future generations would enjoy the results. A rich man might arrange for an avenue of trees to be planted alongside the driveway to his newly built house (a house that might have already been two or more generations in the making) in the knowledge that the trees would not reach maturity until long after his own death.
Similarly, a farmer or small landowner might plant trees on his land so that his heirs would have wood to cut.
Today most of us tend to think far too short term. We need to change that. We need to be less preoccupied with ourselves and more concerned with the world in which we and our descendants will live.
Give yourself an aim, a target or a purpose that makes you part of a cause and you will be able to remain happy whatever happens to you. Even death will be just a comma in the sentence of the cause for which you are fighting.
Only when you have a cause for which you are prepared to die will you really know what living is all about. If your personal aims are tied up with a great cause in which you believe then you truly cannot lose the war. You may lose a battle or two. You may feel exhausted. You may go bankrupt. You may die. But the war in which you are engaged will go on and in so far as you are still part of that war you will not be defeated.
The best way to conquer a fear of death and dying is to achieve a feeling of oneness with those who will come after you. Your cathedral does not have to be made of stone. Make sure now that what you are doing with your life will live on after you.
Taken from Vernon Coleman’s book Spiritpower. For details CLICK HERE
Copyright Vernon Coleman 1997 and October 2025
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