Canterbury

[poliphilo]

Back in the day- when going on pilgrimage was the most fun you could have with your tabard on- Canterbury cathedral was England’s grandest theme park and money making machine. Then Henry VIII destroyed the shrine of Thomas Becket- which was the heart of the enterprise- and it was as like kicking the Mouse out of Disneyland. Before the Reformation Canterbury was one of the capital cities of the Christian imagination and afterwards it was just a provincial town with a big jagged building at its centre for storing battle-flags and burying soldiers in.

There’s a ghostliness about the cathedral, an emptiness. A guide who looked like a gentler, kinder Peter O’Toole latched onto me and told me a couple of the miracles of Thomas Becket. How a blinded thief got his sight back and changed his life, how a woman came all the way from Cologne to be cured of insanity. These stories, once compelling, have become quaint. According to the leaflet we were handed at the door it costs £9000 a day to maintain the building. Only our will sustains it. If we stopped finding it interesting, if the visitors stopped coming, it would crumble- settle like a cloud of suspended dust- and after a couple of hundred years there’d be nothing left but a clutch of broken pillars.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I guess it's not possible to have redundant cathedrals, is it? Only redundant churches.

Our neighborhood is about to turn a church into condos. Better that than tearing it down to make condos, I think -- at least they're saving the facade and the stained glass, which will be part of an atrium.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Last week I had lunch in a new downtown place called "The Mission". Our downtown isn't much,I admit, and I stay as far away from it as I can. Anyway, this place is an old church turned daycare center turned Mexican Restaurant. It a cold, sunny day. The food was good, I've had people tell me it's great Mexican food for the area we are in. But what I remember most about it was the sun through the stained glass windows, and reading on one of them "Given in memory of John Merrick by..." and thinking that John Merrick was the name of the elephant man...

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[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't see why cathedrals shouldn't be declared redundant- some of them must have a terrible job making ends meet. But I guess it would involve wholescale reorganisation of the Church.