Undying hope for a ruined relic
Here I go again, hoping. I know, I know, all hope is folly, but, as Pope observed 300 years ago, it springs eternal in the human breast. And Pope was a four-foot-six-inch hunchback. My reason for hope is Christchurch Cathedral.
We ratepayers have put millions of dollars towards restoring it. We taxpayers have put millions more. But too few millions have been put by the Anglican church, or its parishioners, or other donors, and the work, it seems, has all but stopped. It is clearly one of those projects where the costs will balloon for ever.
And so I, who had lost hope, have begun to hope again that it may not be too late to fail to restore the cathedral. And to do instead what should have been done at the outset, which is to stabilise the ruins and then leave them be.
I said as much in 2012 when the city was a mess, and I said it again in 2018 when the cathedral was still a gaping shell with pigeons in the rafters and rubble in the nave, and I say it again now. For as a memorial of the earthquake, and as a record of this city's history, and as a symbol of our status on this earth, the shattered cathedral could not be bettered.
Come with me to Kurfurstendamm in the prosperous heart of Berlin. Amid the high-rise buildings and the coffee and cakes and the rich boutiques you'd never guess the place was flattened by bombs in the Second World War. But go round a corner and look, the blackened, broken spire of Kaiser Wilhelm Church, left just as it stood after an Allied raid in 1943. The locals know it as the hollow tooth. There's history. There's how it was. Lest we forget.
And we do forget. There are already kids in secondary school who were born after the quake. Soon it will seem as distant as the Second World War.
Our broken cathedral is far from unique. The world abounds in ruined places of worship, and how evocative they are: Neolithic stone circles, Mayan sacrifice-houses, Egyptian temples of the sun, all built to gods who are gods no longer. Faiths come and faiths go.
Christchurch is no longer a predominantly Christian city, let alone an Anglican one. But the cathedral attests to the settlers who brought their faith and its architecture and sought to build an ideal society in its image, here in the Southern Ocean. And the cathedral's ruined state attests to a truth that will outlast all faiths, which is that we inhabit the cooling crust of a molten planet that is utterly indifferent to our wellbeing.
We know that already if we choose to be honest, but there is a difference between knowing it intellectually, and seeing it embodied in a relic preserved at the heart of the city. And we have one last chance to do it. Let us hope.
Meanwhile, on the subject of relics, 21 years ago I wrote a book called A Land of Two Halves. It told the story of a hitch-hiking trip around this country, but I missed out on the top half of the South Island.
Now the publishers want to reissue the book later this year which gives me a chance to remedy that omission.
So if, in the next couple of weeks, you are driving north of Christchurch and you see a man who is far too old to be hitching a lift, hitching a lift, well, there is faith, there is hope and there is charity, according to St Paul, and the greatest of these is charity.
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