Once, cathedrals were built as great caverns to draw in the masses and there cower them with awe of majesties beyond mortal grasp.
Masons toiled with a pretence of ancient knowledge not understood and created vaults, arches, and buttresses. They carved friezes of adoration and grotesqueries designed, somehow, to still the troubled mind.
Cathedrals come and go. Built in reverence they are lost in battles between kings and popes or falling bombs and raging accidental fires, even lost when people leave for lands and places new, for ‘time and unexpected events overtake them all’.
And what is more unexpected than changes wrought of time? If times are changing what changes do they bring for the heart and soul of they whose ancestors perched on wooden pews while chanting Latin words to which enrobed clergy gave neither comprehension nor meaning?
A cathedral is a cavern in which to hide and be bathed by light filtered through glass which blurs and splinters the enlivening sun. But new caverns now exist, vast sheds, great gloomy caves which hide the sky and have scant regard to any form or design proposed to elevate a sinking soul.
To mammon, and avarice, these temples are raised to everything the flesh may desire or want and where once attendees mumbled unknowing Latin now they nod earnestly and sign, unread, terms of service and threats to their credit file which bind them as tightly as fears of non-existent hell ever did.
Poem by stuartcturnbull, picture from OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay
This poem is one written over the summer. It is part of a suite of poems that considers UK history and life from roughly the end of the Second World War through to an unknown future.
The suite's title is from the opening line of the fourth stanza in William Blake's 1808 poem Jerusalem.