Joan Didion, in her 1976 essay “James Pike: American,” recalls the Grace Episcopal Church of her childhood memories, its “big rose windows” glowing at night, as the “nexus of all old California money,” a monument to the state’s pioneer history, emblematic of a perpetual quest and as such a spiritual work-in progress whose construction would never be “finished”—that is, until Bishop James Pike, a man in a hurry to be on the cutting edge of everything, would arrive on the scene in 1964, raise $3 million and pronounce Grace “finished.” In this way, Grace and the story of Pike—a quintessential figure of the 1960s who would die wandering around in the Judean desert—become a parable for an American (or, anyway, Californian) tendency to discard history in the quest for the “new.”
Its a beautiful structure and I caught it on a late afternoon with the setting sun burnishing the face of the Cathedral.
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