deciding to do what with this crazy idea

On every potentially time-wasting mission, it matters less where a sign might have come from and more what's done with it next.

Since the 1980s, I'd understood that if I ever did build a cathedral it would have to be in that place we all came to know as the internet.

But only recently have we become aware and concerned that an all-pervasive internet (entwined with every critical global infrastructure and an abundance of entities possessing artificial intelligence) is continuing to lock increasing percentages of our children’s attention firmly into the fabric of its many fascinating spaces.

And yet, at the centre of that singularly massive online machine there would appear to be nothing other than a growing number of shopping channels and some indelible instruction to return more riches for a handful of billionaires.

So, all this stuff (and lots of other stuff) has led me to believe I should now be on a mission to help in persuading the world’s leading religious bodies to respond with good effect to the following proposition since - I'm hoping - they may still have the necessary power, resources, connections and influence to ensure an essence of humanity is firmly seated and accessible at the centre of that new, cybernetically envisioned world.

So, I would propose:

Unless we’re endeavouring to seat, maintain & promote humanity [that of God, our species & its virtues] at the heart of the internet then something else will be sitting in our place, and it will imagine nothing in the universe greater than itself.

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And so, it may be that, after more than forty years of searching, I've identified this opportunity wherein my cathedral becomes just a story for the positioning of this idea: for an assembly of attention-grabbing art & design that will be impressive enough to persuade significantly more people of faith to make strides in that great endeavour for the sake of humanity.

Instructions for assembling that work of expeditionary art & design can be found through this link to another page.

In the meanwhile, of course, there is no guarantee that those instructions will work.  And this whole thing might just be another crazy idea.  And maybe - like some have suggested, even my notion of God's existence is just a crazy idea.  But here's a thought: If we were walking along a beach where an obvious lunatic was shouting out some warning that a tsunami was approaching, would we choose to safely ignore that warning - at our peril, or would we bother to waste our precious time in some long stare, across those gently lapping waves, towards that distant horizon?

Many years ago, in a dream, I'd watched a massive wave rising between mountain tops before cascading into a valley and becoming a horde of devastating weaponry, swarming across, crashing into, and flattening everything in its path.  But that same wave had parted just enough to pass around just one building, not even touching its walls and leaving that church as the only thing left standing in the wake of all that destruction.

Then, just a few years ago, it had seemed to me this entire concept was becoming rather too vague and occasionally doom-laden.  So, one afternoon, I'd gone to sit down and pray in the silence of an ancient church.  And when I'd asked if I could be given some kind of precise definition of that cathedral I'd been told to build, my very next thought (presumably dropped into my head by God) was an instant perception of these words, "It's simply an act of love.”

And recently, it might seem, I've been led to understand some symbolic depiction of the heart should be at the centre of whatever comes next.

I'd already doodled one little emoji-like symbolic heart in my notebook - one afternoon, when I'd been sitting alone in a comforting space where I'd gone to pray for some guidance.  But I wasn't entirely convinced of its significance.  So, I was astonished - just a few weeks later (in a place of worship) after I'd been sitting and looking up at the ceiling, wondering if some of its decor could be interpreted as a sign - when some children came into that room where we were sitting and began handing out red paper hearts and one of those hearts had been given by a little girl to me.