Gothic Cathedrals are powerful and beautiful symbols of worship and devotion. They are also impressive feats of engineering. They were massive buildings that took generations to build. As such, they had to be built out of stone. Stones are an incredibly sturdy building material, but they can only handle one kind of force acting on them, which is called compression. You can stack stone blocks on top of each other all day long and the stone on the bottom will be just fine. But you can only build a stone building so big before the weight pushes not only down, but our, and stone doesn't deal well with any kind of tension or shear forces that push out on them. You can use pointed arches and ribbed vaults to redirect a lot of that force down instead of out, but you still need pretty thick walls to handle the load. Not only that, but they needed to build them in a way to maximize the amount of light, which meant creating all of these great, big, beautiful stained glass windows. The problem is if you take out most of the wall for a massive window, then you won't be able to put very much weight on that wall. So they came up with what are called flying buttresses. Flying buttresses are very strong and sturdy piers connected by arches to the main cathedral and this helps transform all of the lateral forces coming off of the weight of the roof and building into downward compressive forces that the stones can handle. These flying buttresses need a lot of weight to make this transformation from sideways to downward force and tend to be built quite massive on their own. However, they also usually feature pinnacles, or spires, which at first glance may seem merely decorative rather than functional. But these pinnacles are packed full of extra mass, sometimes even filled with lead so that the force pushing downward is so much more exceeding than the sideways forces. This extra weight helps drive the load into the bedrock so that the whole building doesn't collapse. And because the flying buttresses are taking all of the extra weight, they can free up the walls to create all of the amazing stained glass windows and fill the cathedrals with light. I bring all of this up because like the pinnacles in cathedrals, our covenants both serve to point our focus up towards the heavens but also serve to redirect the forces and burdens of our lives to flow down and through us rather than to push against us and cause us to collapse. Like a stone is perfectly good at withstanding a virtually unlimited load of a specific kind of force directed downward, we are perfectly good at bearing up under the weight of our covenants. Putting our trust in God is not a trivial matter. It is a heavy burden that we must learn to bear. But if we have arranged our covenants properly, then we will direct the weight of all of the burdens that we are ill equipped to manage straight down into Christ who is the bedrock foundation upon which we must build. “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;” (2 Corinthians 4:17). The eternal weight of glory overwhelms and subsumes the weight of any of our other light afflictions. The more covenants we make, the more elaborate and intricate will be the system of arches and pinnacles and flying buttresses that will ever more efficiently and effectively redistribute the weight and the burden of being so that we can stand in holy places and be not moved.
