Different Gods

My nieces have been visiting with their parents and so we took them out to Guildford Castle to occupy a few minutes. I've been there before, but somehow never really paid attention to the chapel which squeezes onto one side of the Great Chamber. It's tiny, as none of the castle is big; and this photograph doesn't properly convey the dark, almost covert quality of the graffiti-ridden little closet.

This is religion as an adjunct to power. Here the king, when staying in the castle, would have knelt and watched a priest wedged into the far end of the room with an acolyte on the step, making the miracle of Christ's presence, and thought - what? Attempting to bring his own life of violent politics and brutal justice in front of a God who pointed in a different direction entirely.

And yet this place has a different view of God even from the Gothic ages that followed. Here God is mediated through heavy Romanesque arches, darkness, a weight and a power beyond the powers of the world, yet inevitably seen through them and their habits of thought. God is ever the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow, but the way we apprehend him varies. Does God when met in the private chapel of a Norman royal castle have much in common with God met in a modern communal church? This is a God who understands violent politics and brutal justice, and absorbs them, drowns them in the upraised chalice. What sins do our own less confrontational sacred spaces offer up to him by their very shape and nature?