four fried chickens, and a coke

Potentially time-wasting missions will raise questions that deserve to be answered.

For instance: is it more important that we should know from where a sign has come; or should we be more concerned about where that sign is taking us?

And what has been the cost on this "mission from God" since its aims & objectives seem to have been so preferably unclear?

Almost as soon as I'd begun thinking about this cathedral, back in the 1980s (or, maybe, even further back in time, when I was a little boy, perched in the middle of a climbing frame) I'd known - whatever this thing was - it was meant to be something built through a concept we would come to know as the internet.

And, since then, I've been watching with great interest as the internet has grown from just a few pages of relatively obscure information into the very definition of our modern world.  Entire generations have little or no memory of life before the internet.  And now increasing numbers of anxious parents, respected broadcasters and vigilant authorities are expressing their great concern that this all-pervasive internet (entwined with every critical global infrastructure and working through an abundance of entities possessing artificial intelligence) appears to be locking a growing percentage of our children’s attention firmly into the fabric of its many fascinating spaces.

And yet, at the pivotal centre of that ubiquitous and singularly massive online machine (where those fascinating spaces maintain their existence) there appears to be no greater expression of humanity beyond a wealth of shopping channels and some indelible instruction to return unending riches for a handful of billionaires.

Various bodies of commercial and political interests are currently examining proposals to regulate the advance of this technology which is increasingly being described as an 'existential threat to humanity'.

And I'm hoping that our world’s leading religious bodies (since they have recently begun expressing their own concerns) still have the necessary power, resources and influence to ensure an unmistakable essence of humanity will be firmly seated and freely accessible at the centre of that cybernetically envisioned world - because it is my belief that this is what God wants us to know:

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.

Cathedral raison d'être is the same for every cathedral.  Essentially, these buildings house their community of faith's seat of authority - which can be both an authority and in authority.

The tangible aspect of the cathedral I'm building [which I'm slowly discovering through this story] is a project of art & design which might provide some scaffolding to support a building around those leading religious bodies in their endeavour to seat humanity at the heart of the internet.

But - of course - there's always the possibility that this entire project of mine is just another one of my famously grandiose delusions - especially since some would suggest that even my notion of God's existence is just another delusion.

But here's a thought:

Imagine we're walking along a beach when some obvious lunatic begins to shout crazy warnings about an approaching tsunami.  

Do we choose at our peril to safely ignore these obviously ridiculous ravings of a madman; or do we risk wasting a moment of our precious time in giving some relatively long and purposeful stare across those calm and gently lapping waves, towards that distant horizon?

Many years ago, in a dream, I'd watched a massive wave gathering between two mountain tops before rising to cascade into a valley where it had then become a devastating horde of sword wielding horsemen, swarming across the landscape, slashing and flattening everything in its path apart from one church, where that wave had parted and passed around that building's walls, leaving it as the only thing left standing in a landscape now stripped entirely bare of all previous features.

But that's not a vision from which my design is going to take inspiration.  I don't want to be like one of those characters who stand in the middle of town, loudly declaring some apocalyptic warning - Pay attention!  It's the end of the world as we've known it! - to passing crowds of shoppers on a Sunday afternoon

I've occasionally sat down to pray for guidance in the silence of an ancient church.  And once - after asking God for a more precise specification for the cathedral I'd been told to build - the words which had then immediately sprung to mind were, "It's simply an act of love.”

And, more recently, it seems I've been led to understand that a simple, symbolic heart set in a geometric network would be the best (and by far the easiest) art & design I could assemble to effectively project a vision of humanity at the centre of the internet.

One afternoon, while sitting alone in a small room in the Friends' Meeting House in Brighton, and after praying for a little more guidance regarding this cathedral's appearance, I'd doodled a little, emoji-like heart in one of my notebooks. 

But then I hadn't been entirely convinced that my doodle would have any great lasting significance.

So, I'd been utterly astonished, just a few weeks later when - amongst worshipers in the largest room at that Meeting House, where I'd been sitting, looking up at its ceiling and wondering if a particular feature in its functional decor could be interpreted as a sign of how God might want this cathedral to appear - some children had entered the room, and had begun handing out red paper hearts and one of those hearts had been given by a little girl to me.

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