MAGIC MOMENTS

When you travel – for a weekend, a summer vacation, or months at a time – you have a sliding scale of hopes.  There’s the basic one:  you hope nothing horrible happens to you when you’re on the road.  Then there are the next ones:  the house doesn’t burn down while you’re gone, the cat doesn’t die, burglars don’t steal all your belongings, the weather at home isn’t better than where you’ve spent a small fortune to travel to, your destination isn’t boring/awful/disappointing.

Residing among the hopes for safety and basic enjoyment is the longing for magic moments: the unexpected gems that appear like travel diamonds, twinkling in a hidden city courtyard or glistening in fields of springtime green.  You have to keep your eyes and heart open for magic moments.  You can miss them between arguments over map directions or looking for street signs or generally allowing a veil of distraction to form between you and the experience at hand. 

I had the shivery thrill of a magic moment in London, and it involved an old church – as they so often do – and a hidden back-street courtyard.  We were down in the old City, the one-mile stretch that formed the first kernel of what would become the sprawling capital of England.  The entrance to The City was marked by an arch where traitors’ heads would be stuck, the decapitated visages staring down as bloody reminders of the power of the king.  The Strand, a major thoroughfare, connects The City with the city of London.

Just off the Strand is the maze of the Temple area where barristers and legal scholars have worked and studied for centuries among buildings that Shakespeare included as backdrops for scenes in his plays.  You enter the Temple complex through a stone archway and almost immediately, the pounding rumble of the busy streets disappears.  It is astonishingly quiet.

Deep in the maze is a little round church made of time-burnished stone.  It was built by the Knights Templar who were a safe-keeping order of knights formed to escort pilgrims to the Holy Land during the Crusades.  The church was built in the 1100s.  The 1100s.  In the circular part of the building lie 6 stone effigies on the church floor.  They are knights, in full armor, with shields and swords by their sides.  One jousted with Richard the Lionheart, and later served as a mediator between the nobles and Richard’s brother John.  This knight led tense negotiations with fellow lords and King John in this round room in which my 21^st century self now stands.  The negotiations resulted in King John’s reluctant signing of the Magna Carta, a statement of legal rights and guarantees that has influenced western legal systems ever since that knight, surrounded by his fellows, argued with the king one night, more than 900 years ago, in this room.  

Was the king announced with formal pomp as he swept through the huge thick wooden door against which I am leaning?  Were torches flaring in sconces against the cool stone wall at my back?  Did candles glint that night like the sunlight glints today off the cream-colored stone?  What horrible retribution did this knight face as he greeted the king right here, on this spot, with a tense “My Lord,” presenting the requests of the nobles?

His effigy now lies on the church floor, his body angled in formal repose, his face a mask of stone. 

Wooden pews and a beautiful pipe organ are inside the small square of the church that connects to this round room where the knights lay.   On this 21^st century day an organist climbs up a small flight of stairs and takes his place and begins to play.  The music swirls around the room like smoke from guttering candles. 

Outside a tree is in full blossom, its white flowers bedecking the round side of the church like diamonds, brilliant and dazzling, there in plain sight if you only look.