London on the Vigil for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul

Yesterday I rode the train into London for the outrageous price of twenty-one pounds (that's over $30) for just 50 minutes both ways!  If you can dodge around all the construction work at King's Cross, you get this magnificent view of the facade of St. Pancras Train Station, next door.

Mid morning on Trafalgar Square with a glimpse of Big Ben towering over the bustling streets crowded with pedestrians, compact European cars, and British double-decker buses.

I spent three and a half hours in the National Gallery.  It has a stupendous collection of paintings ranging from poignant medieval crucifixions backed in gold leaf to Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers.  My primary object of pilgrimage in the National Gallery, however, was the two Jan van Eyck paintings--a self portrait and the artist's renowned Arnolfini portrait.  Van Eyck had painstakingly painted inscriptions on the frames of the paintings so that it looked like the elaborate fifteenth-century script was carved into the wood rather than brushed on in paint.  The illusion was unbelievable.

View of the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields through the massive columns on the National Gallery porch.

 I only had a little over an hour at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but it was enough time to be overwhelmed by the rich collections that I suppose once belonged to Queen Victoria, "Empress of India."  Can you imagine a collection of nineteenth-century snuff boxes covered in diamonds tinted pink and yellow?  That's the kind of thing that causes rebellions against the aristocracy!  The medieval collection had carved altarpieces, faded ecclesiastical vestments, and illuminated manuscripts.

Renaissance stained glass panel of the crucifixion from northern Europe in the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Although I like to see art in its original context it is nice to be able to get close to the windows and see the brilliant colors in the artificially constant light of museum.  I hadn't realized how much stained glass buckles over time.  The surfaces of some of these windows are quite bumpy.

At 5:00 pm I went to St. Paul's Cathedral for Evensong.  What a blessing that it happened to be the Vigil for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul!  Appropriately, the cathedral that bears the name of the Apostle to the Gentiles celebrated the occasion with grandeur.  Christopher Wren's spacious white interior glittered with its nineteenth-century mosaics as the choristers from London's Catholic Cathedral of Westminster processed into the choir stalls as guest performers.  Vespers was almost entirely in Latin, and one of the priests wore a golden cope (a long ecclesiastical cape), and he swung censer to bless the altar and the congregation with incense.  There is no more beautiful way to appreciate the architecture and images of a church than to observe it while sacred music is reverberating off its walls.

The "Empress of India" stands regally before the cathedral.  The building was particularly majestic lit up at night, and yet I still found myself humming--almost irreverently--the words, "Early each day to the steps of St. Paul's, the little old bird-woman comes ... feed the birds, tuppence a bag!"