Building can lead to spiritual experience

The relation of a human being to a building, though it may sound strange, is influenced by human emotions only and certainly not by the saga of materialism. Do you agree or disagree? If you disagree, how can you define the desperate effort of Indians to preserve the historic structure of Taj Mahal? There is no straight answer to this yet. But this may be termed as an infectious disease and people hailing from United States (known as the highest votary of capitalism) are no exceptions to this.

This is found in Tehama County, California, these days, where monks are seen to piece together stones from an 800-year-old building. The noble effort is going to construct California’s oldest standing structure. Well, the initiative is being taken by monks from the Abbey of New Clairvaux and they are gradually putting together stones from a pre-Gothic meeting house built in Spain during the Middle Ages. It was in the year 1931 when the millionaire newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst got hold of the original building but pulled it down in the later days and shipped to California to be part of Wyntoon, his estate near the McCloud River.

However, it was the Great Depression that changed the destiny and the stones were left putrefying in Golden Gate Park. But it was in the 1990s when San Francisco gave the stones to the monks. This single incident led to the initiation of a new era and monks started trimming the stones, fixing broken pieces and reinforcing the building with concrete and steel to meet modern earthquake codes.

You can see some stones still that are standing behind the walls of the Abbey of New Clairvaux, where the monastery monks have been putting them together for the past five years. Speaking on this brother John Cullen said, “There is a spiritual experience seeing it the way it is now.”