It is normal at Bedford School to start the spring term in Chapel. These days it is more a logistical issue than anything else, but it would, I think, be an appropriate way to start the year anyway. To explain why I think that, I am going to take you today to the oldest – and in my opinion most wonderful – church in Florence in Italy. San Miniato al Monte celebrated its 1000th birthday just before the pandemic, a celebration of one of its oldest documents left by its founder, an Italian Bishop called Hilderbrand, in 1018, which stated that he had discovered the bones of an early Christian saint called Minias and was building a new church to house them. The story went that Minias was a hermit living on this hill near Florence in the time of the Romans. He had been discovered a Christian and, after refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods, was horribly persecuted – he was thrown into a furnace, stoned and thrown to the lions but amazingly survived them all. Ultimately, he was beheaded in the main square in Florence, whereupon he picked up his head, crossed the River Arno, and climbed back up the hill to where he lived and eventually died – and where the great church of San Miniato now sits.
The spot is absolutely amazing, outside the city walls on a hill overlooking the valley and the city of Florence, purposefully looking straight towards the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge into the city, across which (or rather its Roman Predecessor) St Minias would have walked with his head under his arm to find his beautiful resting place.
Now you need to imagine a church about five or six times the size of this Chapel, in every proportion – length, height, width, number of steps up to it, surrounding areas. It is in fact an old basilica, with colonnades down each side of an internal nave and small chapels leading off the main section. You therefore need to imagine something a bit more like a cathedral than a church. The raised view out towards Florence is stunning (so is our own, by the way – remember that when you walk out of this building); but the interior is no less so. As you enter, there is a sign which reads in Latin haec est porta coeli or ‘this is Heaven’s gate’. I returned many times to this church, partly as it seemed to me to be probably as close as I’ll ever get to ‘Heaven’s gate’! The interior is filled with endless interest – amazing frescoes, sculptures and mosaics from a range of household names in the artistic world who, over the years, have been commissioned to produced pieces for the church. And where the artwork and structures of so much of the 100-plus churches in Florence have been restored, much of San Miniato seems to have been left as it was, which gives it an almost reverential impression of age and authority.
The same goes for its traditions. Two particular services in this church stood out for me. Firstly, every evening at dusk, the benedictine monks, whose monastery has attached itself to the church for the last 800 years, sing their praises for about 40 minutes in plainchant. They file in silently, to a completely silent church, line up in two rows opposite one another, and start to sing, led in their chant by, it seemed, a different monk each time. There is no order of service, no participation from the congregation whatsoever, no way for the uninitiated to know what they are singing, and, when they come to an end, they simply file away in silence and disappear off back to their monastery. I went more than once to this service; what was the point, and why did I enjoy it enough to go back?
The other service was a Catholic Mass delivered in Latin every Sunday evening at 5.30pm. I had some internal motivation for this, as my own local church when I was growing up used to say Latin mass once a month, and I had not been to one for at least 40 years – in fact, I had not even been anywhere where one was available. It was indeed wonderful – a partly sung mass, with sung responses, which – even more wonderfully – a good number of the 150 present seemed to know and be able to sing. The sermon was in Italian, a full 30 minutes, some of which I understood, and some which I did not, but was full of intense passion and really quite something. I had some advantage of years and language in this service, but even so, large parts of the hour were unintelligible, and I was more of an observer than a participant. And yet, I loved it. Why?
Well, it was to do with the space – not only the physical space, but the mental space. Understandably, the mind wanders. It is free; it goes everywhere. I even thought of you all in here when I was sitting listening to those monks. Many of you do not have a Christian tradition to fall back on, and even if you have, you may not understand everything we do in Chapel; many of you do not listen to every word said in Chapel, and many listen to very few; many of you wonder why you are here, and many of you wish you were not. The eyes wander, too. There’s an incredible mosaic at the far end of the church, high above and behind the altar, of God as Jesus Christ with his mother, the Virgin Mary, on one side and Saint Minias on the other (where you might often expect John the Baptist). Saint Minias is holding out a crown. The depiction of Christ is quite formulaic – you can see very similar depictions all over the Christian world – but nevertheless stunning, and given place by the presence of Saint Minias. No doubt there were lots of other messages designed to be sent by the artist, who was clearly a master, but what were they? Who was the artist? Is his message still there? To the right of where I sat was an amazing old wall painting of St Christopher, half the height of the church, fading a bit now after half a millennium, shown as he often is with a long staff, a kind of walking stick his own height, bare-footed, or light-sandalled, wearing a shawl, and with the infant Jesus on his shoulders. There, underneath him, remarkably, as I watched, in walked a modern-day pilgrim, similar shawl, barefoot, with a staff as tall as himself which he leant on to listen to the Benedictine monks. He walked, slightly bent of back, silent as a mouse, across in front of the fresco of St Christopher, looking upwards and taking in his new surroundings. Who was he? Where did he come from? Why did he follow them up the stairs afterwards? Where was he going? What was his background?
The space, therefore, in which I was sitting, both in its physicality and in my mind was both familiar and unfamiliar, both attention-seeking and attention-giving, both historic and current, both still and stimulating. Walking out of San Miniato, it is impossible not to feel at peace, uplifted, smiling. The air seems fresher and the world more colourful, and it is all to do with space – the physical beauty of it, and the space in the day for your own mind.
Let this building be your space – your physical space to look at, to question, to explore; but also, importantly, your mental space to be silent, to learn from words and sights, but also to have time to drift. Try to let it drift towards eternal things, not something as trivial as today’s problem, or yesterday’s issue, but observe this space and the space in your own mind as something much more lasting and important, something permanent in a building which itself has a sense of permanence and beauty. That way you can come to cherish this place and not fear it. Over time, I think you will.
