Truth revealed in Cathedral Square’s pile of stones

believe, unblemished.

Be they cults or established faiths (the difference between the two being merely size of income) I have criticised them explicitly and implicitly for failing to acknowledge the obvious reality of things. How any of them persist post-Darwin I have no idea. And yet, that said, I amabout to praise the authorities of the Anglican Church to the non-existent heavens.

Regular readers may recall that I wrote a column in early 2012 suggesting that the ruined cathedral be left exactly as it was for future generations to gawp at. There could be no better quake memorial, I said. Now I have no way of telling whether the Anglican bigwigs read my column, but that is precisely what they’ve done. They threw a fence around the ruin and let it be. The result is already spectacular. After only seven years the cathedral has become as evocative as a Mayan ruin in the jungle. It is eerie. It is beautiful. It is touching and it is telling.

One end of the building is open to the world. Rubble is heaped in what was once the nave. Weeds have colonised the stonework. And amid the rafters pigeons sit contentedly and coo to each other in quiet possession of a space that once rang with hymns and prayers. You would have to be dead of heart and mind not to look at it and think.

Here is the history of Christchurch. Here’s the fantasy that smug Victorians sought to impose on this island in the South Pacific. The fantasy was classbound and church-centred, and its nub was this cathedral, built in stone in imitation of elsewhere. That stone was its undoing. Had it been of native timbers it would have swayed and stood, but it was as unbending as Victorian morality. It cracked and fell. And in falling it became a metaphor for the faith that had erected it. Today we are a secular society.

And here too is the greater scientific truth expressed. In place of god we have tectonic plates. Like god they can bring ruin. But unlike him they don’t play favourites. We’re not the chosen species, the favoured mammal of him upstairs. In the face of geological forces we stand on the skin of the earth as vulnerable and insignificant as every other creature.

So much truth in a heap of stone. All I can do is repeat what I said in 2012. Let’s leave it as it is. (Oh and please, yes, of course I’m aware of the Anglicans’ real reasons for doing nothing. But can a man not entertain a brief and harmless fantasy that he made something happen?)

Let Christ Church Cathedral stand as a monument to Victorian folly.