The National Cathedral is in a crunch and has closed its beloved greenhouse.Expect that isn’t quite the spin put on it by one Cathedral official:”It’s no longer economically viable,”said Margaret Bergan Davis, assiciate dean of the Cathedral.”In the post 9-11 world, with large divisions that we are trying to heal , does the cathedral belong running a greenhouse?”
While the national press focused their attention on the historic debate regarding Climate Change Legislation last week in the senate, a debate that was unfortunately cut short by parliamentary wrangling, hundreds of ordinary Washingtonians concentrated their own efforts on preserving a historic greenhouse just few miles from the Capital that is emblematic about the large national debate about our stewardship of the natural enviroment.
The issue arose as a result of a budgetary crisis at the National Cathedral which is in its centennial year and has recently spent lavishly on major ‘improvements’ including a 35 million dollar underground parking garage to accommodate up a hundreds of cars and eighteen tour buses, as well as a seven million dollar anniversary program replete with light shows and headline speakers.
At the same time the Cathedral, which is run by an independent foundation, wholly apart from the Episcopal church, decide to close the sixty year old greenhouse which has served generations of families and is regarded by many city residents as the most sacred place on the Cathedral’s ground.
It is an inviteing green chapel that stands in contrast to the Cathedral’s overpowering monumental structure, best know for the state funerals of american Presidents and society weddings.
Perhaps not surprisingly however, the Cathedral’s administration,which is presided over by a thirty year ex-military officer who served with the Pentagon’s Joint chief of Starff did not consult with the greenhouse’s many congregants, who have, in barely a week,launched an unprecedented grass roots campaign to reverse the Cathedral’s action and to reinvigorate the greenhouse’s role in the Cathedral’s large ministry to Washington and wider world.
Notably the Cathedral’s spirital leader, the Right Reverend Samual Lloyd, has often sermonized about the church’s responsibility to the enviroment,describing enviromental degredation as perhaps the greatest spiritual crisis of the age, saying” I am not calling upon you to save the world but to do what you an as an individual.”
It seems that the hundreds of people who have recently signed the internet based petition to save the greenhouse seem to have taken him as his world and manyof them have left comments as eloquent as any voiced from the cathedral’s pulpit.
Isn’t it now time that the Cathedral practice what they preach.
