in deciding what to do about this crazy cathedral building idea
in deciding what to do about this crazy cathedral building idea
If I'm following signs, it might not matter so much where those signs came from, it’s where those signs are taking me which matters most.
Unfortunately, it seems, my belief that God had told me to build a cathedral (while I've also been failing to do so many right things in life) has driven me to almost total distraction.
In a dream, I'd seen a massive wave of weaponry crashing across a landscape and then seen it part just momentarily to pass around a church, which would be the only thing left standing in the wake of that destruction.
And it's stuff like that which had only strengthened my conviction. I was on a mission, telling people of faith what I thought we should be doing to save humanity. Which has probably been something of an embarrassment.
Over the past forty years or more, I've believed God has been continuing to indicate what kind of cathedral I should be building. And right from the start, I'd understood this building would have to stand for the good of all humanity, and it would have to be built in a place that we all came to know as the internet.
These days, it's all become reasonably obvious. Global infrastructures, the all-pervasive internet and an abundance of entities possessing artificial intelligence are rapidly becoming entwined in an online cybernetically envisioned landscape which is continuing to lock increasing percentages of our children’s attention firmly into the fabric of its many fascinating spaces.
And yet what do we see there at the centre of that massive machine, apart from growing numbers of shopping channels and some indelible instruction to return more riches for a handful of billionaires?
I've believed it is a concern to which people of faith need to be paying more attention.
I have been suggesting that our communities of different faiths should be coming together in an effort to persuade the world’s leading religious bodies - which (unlike our individual and therefore relatively small and constrained communities of faith, tradition & belief) have the necessary power, resources, connections and influence - to ensure an essence of humanity will be firmly seated and accessible at the centre of that new, cybernetically envisioned, online world.
Although it may be a little too concise, in numerous meetings and presentations, I've been putting forward the following proposition.
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.
And some people have been polite and have assured me that they were listening. But most appear terrified that I could be utterly wasting their time.
But who knows? Either I’m just an irritating and deluded fool who can safely be ignored. Or it might be the case that God sent those signs which may be ignored at our peril.
Either way, there's just one more thing which maybe I should do before giving up completely on this ridiculous mission.
I think I should be putting together a work of attention-grabbing expeditionary art & design. And then, if any passer-by were to ask me, "What does it all mean?" I could recommend reading this story and see where that might take them.
So, the initial instructions for assembling that work of art & design are here.
And I have no doubt that some symbolic depiction of the heart was always meant to be at the centre of whatever comes next.
A few years ago, I'd been worrying that this entire concept had become rather too vague. So, one day I was visiting a church, and I sat down to pray for some kind of precise definition of the cathedral I was supposed to be building. And the very next thought that I had (which I still believe God put in my head) were these words, "It's simply an act of love.”
And, quite recently, I was sitting in a Meeting House and I'd been praying for a sign, so I found it quite astonishing, just a few minutes later, when a few children who had just come into that room began handing out red paper hearts and one of those hearts was given by a little girl to me.