Sunday, April 19, 2009

The wheels move

I've mentioned that the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine is committed to being the cathedral of the city of New York the way cathedrals worked in medieval European cities. So it makes perfect sense that it should have furnished the site for New York's first "Blessing of the Bikes" on Saturday. Apparently the Very Rev. Harry Pritchett, the priest who sprinkled water on 100 cyclists and remembered the 20 cyclists who were killed in the past year, read from Ezekiel:

When the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. 'Wherever the spirit would go, they went and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. (1:19-20)

Can that obscure passage (an inspiration, come to think of it, for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials) have been waiting for this day?