The Stone in the Rubble

Resurgam. Before you can understand what the word means, you have to understand the site.

Fires have played a regular role in the history of St. Paul's. The first cathedral on Ludgate Hill was a wooden structure built in 604 A.D. It burned, and its replacement was destroyed by Vikings 300 years later in 962. A third cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1087. The fourth — the Gothic cathedral known as Old St. Paul's — was a structure of almost incomprehensible scale.

The cathedral took construction started under the Normans in 1087. It was consecrated in 1240 and enlarged between 1256 and 1314 — 227 years of deliberate, agonizing attention to detail and grandour. Old St. Paul's was 586 feet long and 290 feet wide. Its spire was one of the tallest in Europe, second only to Lincoln Cathedral.

The spire caught fire in 1561 and collapsed into the pews below, and was never rebuilt. By the time the cathedral burned down in 1666, it was already crumbling from time, neglect, and Reformation-era abuse.

So when the Great Fire came for it, it was burning a building that had already died and been resurrected multiple times.

The site itself carried a pattern of desire, growth, and destruction.

Christopher Wren was not just an architect. He was an English architect, astronomer, mathematician and physicist — one of the most highly acclaimed architects in the history of England. He was a founder of the Royal Society and served as its president from 1680 to 1682. He came to architecture sideways, from science. He thought in systems.

Recently discovered letters document Wren's involvement in St. Paul's as early as 1661, when he was consulted by Charles II regarding repairs to the medieval structure. Five years later, in the spring of 1666, he made his first design for a dome for St. Paul's. The King was impressed by his creativity and eagerly approved the plan for construction.

It was August 27th. In 1666. No one could know that just eight days later the building would no longer existed.

In the early hours of Sunday, September 2nd, a fire started in Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane, around half a mile east of St. Paul's. Over the next 4 days, the cathedral and most of the City of London had been destroyed.

At approximately 8:00 pm, two days into the blaze, fire broke out on the roof of St. Paul's when a burning ember landed in a gap in the roof, causing fire to spread to the supporting timbers inside. Wooden scaffolding erected as part of Wren's restoration work fuelled the inferno as it caught alight.

In a tragic paradox, the scaffolding Wren had placed there for the very purpose of saving the building became an accelerant for its destruction.

The fire left the greater part of the walls of the cathedral standing, albeit with their stained glass windows destroyed. The roof and part of the burial vaults were destroyed. After some early plans to patch up the old fabric of the building, it soon became apparent that it was unsafe. Wren proposed a messy, uncomfortable solution — tearing down the beloved cathedral and building a new one in its place.

Pay attention now. Because here is the moment where breakthrough happens.

Being a practical designer, Wren traced out the dome of his planned masterwork on the ground and stood at the centre. He had cleared the site of Old St. Paul's, ruined in the Great Fire of London of 1666, but not yet started on the new cathedral.

Needing a marker for the centre spot, he called for a worker to bring him a stone from the rubble scattered around the site. After reaching down and gathering the nearest piece of broken brick, the man tossed the piece of rubble to Wren.

As Wren pressed the brick between his fingers, he turned it over in his hand. On the back of that fragment of broken masonry he found an inscription with a single word: RESURGAM — Latin for "I will rise again."

The word came from a grave. Someone buried under the floor of that cathedral — whose name is now lost — had chosen as their epitaph the first-person future active declaration of resurrection. I will rise.

Not may I rise, not may he rest.

A declaration.

And that stone, pulled from a thousand pounds of rubble by an anonymous laborer who grabbed the nearest thing available, happened to be that stone.

Wren never forgot this omen.

Wren did not pocket the stone and move on. He made it the theological signature of the entire project.

He had the word carved into the south pediment of the new cathedral, where it sits beneath a phoenix rising from the ashes — a symbol of the new cathedral rising on the site of the old.

The sculptor he commissioned for this work was Caius Gabriel Cibber — a Dane who had come to London in the late 1650s and made himself indispensable to the rebuilding of the city. Cibber's work at St. Paul's — the relief of a Phoenix Arising from the Ashes in the pediment of the South Transept — was executed between 1697 and 1700, as the cathedral neared completion. He was, by that point, so indebted from gambling that he was reportedly let out of debtor's prison on day release to complete the commission.

The sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber was instructed to portray a phoenix rising from the ashes — a fitting symbol for the Cathedral — and to include the one word that had cheered Wren.

So what you see on the south face of St. Paul's today is: a phoenix, wings outstretched, rising from flames. And beneath it, carved in stone: RESURGAM.

The tombstone fragment became a carving. The accident became the motto. The rubble became the message.

St. Paul's rose swiftly. Few cathedrals are built in a lifetime. The last great version of that venerable cathedral took 227 years to build. Wren completed the project in just 35 years.

That is almost unheard of in cathedral construction. Medieval cathedrals routinely took 100 to 300 years. Wren finished his in a single working life. The foundation stone was laid on 21 June 1675. The dome was completed in 1708. The final stone was set in place. Wren was 78 years old at completion — and his son, also named Christopher, laid that final stone.

Wren personally supervised the building work, visiting the site every Saturday. The 14th-century octagonal chapter house on the south of the cathedral was used as his site office. He hired only the finest artists and craftsmen.

He forbade his workmen to curse on the project, reminding them on pain of dismissal that they were engaged in a holy work.

The total cost, by the time Parliament declared it complete in December of 1711 was a huge sum — more than $45M in today's terms. It was paid for partly through donations and partly through London's Coal Tax, which was increased after the Great Fire to help fund reconstruction in the City.

Wren's body was deposited in the great vault under the dome of the cathedral he built. His commemoration stone reads:

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

"Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."

The man who built the monument left no monument to himself. The building is the monument. And the building carries, on its south face, the word that defined the entire project before a single foundation stone was laid.

Here is where Resurgam earns its weight a second time.

On the night of December 29th in 1940 — the 114th night of the Blitz — German bombs destroyed hundreds of buildings. Thick black smoke filled the air. The raid became known as the Second Great Fire of London: more than 160 people died, over 500 were injured, and hundreds of buildings were destroyed.

When a picture was taken the next morning, almost every building immediately around St. Paul's had burned down, with the cathedral surviving in a wasteland of destruction.

Its survival was mainly due to the efforts of a special group of firewatchers — the St. Paul's Watch — urged by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to protect the cathedral. Twenty-nine incendiaries fell on and around the cathedral. One incendiary burned through the lead dome and threatened to fall into the wooden support beams beneath.

With trembling feet and a racing heart, members of the watch scrambled through the rafters despite the falling bombs to reach the bomb that threatened to burn the wooden beams holding up the old cathedral.

Seconds felt like hours as the bomb burned red hot, finally falling outwards from the roof onto the Stone Gallery, where it was quickly extinguished.

Churchill issued a message: "St. Paul's must be saved at all costs."

The photograph Herbert Mason took that night from the roof of the Daily Mail building — St. Paul's dome rising above walls of smoke and fire — became instantly famous, turning the cathedral into a symbol of togetherness, survival, and suffering. To a British audience, the building was a visual token of nothing short of civilization itself — perfectly suited to being a significant wartime symbol: a place of worship, a symbol of London, and an emblem of the Great Fire of 1666 from which it had arisen as a phoenix.

The building built on Resurgam had to live Resurgam a second time.

One more layer, because you the detail is what beauty — and this one matters for how you use it.

At the core, Resurgam is about you speaking with certainty about what you will do.

RESURGAM is first-person future active indicative of the Latin verb resurgere — to rise again, to surge back up. The construction breaks down as: re- (again) + surgere (to rise, to surge). The English word "surge" descends from this. So does "resurrection."

It is not a prayer. It is not a hope. It is not passive. It is a declaration made by the speaker about their own future. I will rise. Present speaker. Future tense. Active voice. No hedging. No appeal to external agency.

Carved on a tombstone, it was the last words of someone who believed death was a temporary condition.

Found in rubble, it became the organizing principle of one of the greatest building projects in English history.

Mounted above the south entrance, beneath a phoenix, it has stared down at London through plague, fire, war, and time — for over 300 years.

The word Resurgam does not describe a comeback. It doesn't even describe survival. It describes something more specific: an entity in ruin, speaking in present tense, about a future that hasn't happened yet but is stated as certain.

There is no doubt in the construction. There is no if I rise or when I rise. There is only I will rise.

You don't need to know how you're going to rise to believe that you will rise.

Those moments when you're struggling with a relationship that won't stabilize. The times you wonder if your kids are going to make it. That project and team at the office that just won't cooperate. A job search that's going nowhere. Rebuilding your life after betrayal. Starting over when it already feels too late in life to begin something new.

This newsletter is all about that rise. It's about the journey through the messy middle.

There is no straight line up-and-to-the-right. It's a spider web of ducks and dives, crawling through tunnels, dragging yourself out of mud pits, jumping over leaping flames, enduring torture meant for somebody else. It's about you moving in the right direction, but crawling on your hands and knees backwards.

And that's what this newsletter is all about — exploring the messiness of success that's hard to structure.

There's a lot that's been written about how to start—a business, a relationship, having a baby, building a business. And there's a lot about the end part, celebrating success, how to find happiness once you've achieved growth or your goals.

All of this comes back to your Resurgam.

You will rise. Nothing will stop you. And everything we talk about from this moment forward are the tools, tactics, frameworks, structures, strategies, and insights on how we do that and how we do it together—as a community, as a partnership, as a brotherhood and sisterhood, as a community of people who are committed to excellence.

Wren didn't need a stone to tell him what to do. He already knew. But the stone confirmed it — and he was wise enough to put it on the building.

Let’s build your cathedral.

Grab a pen and a post-it note. Write the words, "I WILL RISE" on that post-it note. Stick it to the side of your computer monitor — where you'll see it during work and throughout the day, weekends and all.