Gunpowder, band-wagon and lot Part 4

Winchester cathedral (stock photo)

If you have got this far in my diatribe you'll appreciate that I do not necessarily believe in a six 24-hour day creation. In our group we get around difficulties in OT exegesis like this by spiritualising. This technique is based on "now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come". We say the Bible is a spiritual book and can only be understood by spiritual people. Exactly what is meant by "spiritual" is a moot point but it's not literal, carnal, natural, physical, tangible or demonstrable.

This link quotes the sad story of Charles Templeton, one time popular evangelist to thousands and partner with Billy Graham only to go on to become an atheist, to demonstrate that any who deny six literal creation days will follow suit. Which theory does not bode well for me. But the argument is good in so far as it emphasises the need for solid foundation. Both parts of the Bible (and I make no apology for so often quoting it whatever I might conclude) have a lot to say about foundation, most notably that other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire... 

Winchester cathedral was built in the peaty flood plain of the river Itchen on a foundation of oak logs. The story goes how, after discovering huge cracks in the walls, a diver William Walker was commissioned to bolster up the foundations below the water table and so the iconic building was saved. My foundations, though hitherto I had thought adequate, are likewise causing cracks in the edifice I have built on them. All ye do-gooders that will, on reading this, jump up to utter trite encouraging words beware: you might have more on your hands than you bargained for! Because:

From 1906, Walker laboured under water below the Cathedral for six hours a day at depths up to 6 metres (20 ft). He worked in total darkness, using his bare hands to feel his way through the cloudy, muddy water. His huge, heavy diving suit took a long time to put on. So when he stopped for lunch, he’d just take off his helmet. It took him six years to excavate the flooded trenches and fill them with bags of concrete. When he’d finished, all the groundwater could be pumped out and the subsiding walls safely underpinned by bricklayers. By 1911, the team of 150 workmen of which he was part had packed the foundations with an estimated 25,000 bags of concrete, 115,000 concrete blocks, and 900,000 bricks.

If that story don't light your fire, your wood's wet - I'm tearing up after just copying that text. It's all the more apropos because back in school days I lived only seven miles from the cathedral and attended an annual service there in connection with Peter Symonds School. Like other European cathedrals it is a totally awesome building all the more so when one considers the limited equipment they had back then.

So what are my conclusions?  The mere idea that I should even consider conclusions about such momentous concepts seems preposterous. Who am I to dictate what should or should not have happened thousands of years ago?  But this much I will say.

Here's a board book I was reading at dinner time. Actually it is not mine - it belongs to my Thai granddaughter. It is a good example of the absurd. The artist has gone to great lengths to add strange detail in the yellow levers, green cylinder and various pipes, but they are all totally ridiculous and untrue. Why go to all that bother only to lie? Will a child as young as my granddaughter care? Probably not, but in a few years she will - I know because I was once a child, fobbed off with untruths and caring about it. Children are not as stupid as some adults (who apparently never had a childhood) maintain. 

Perhaps some of the Bible stories are like this. In an effort to simplify to suit our limited intelligence and yet maintain interest the accounts are indicative but not intended to be exact in every matter. I find that I cannot accept, and do not think I ever have since college days, the fundamentalist claim that the text of the Bible is literally true in every respect, for example creation in six literal 24 hour days? Or Noah's flood being global when it is more likely that it only covered the then known world: the fertile crescent and its curtilage. I realise such statements may offend some of my readers but, after all, this blog is a picture of Me and not Them and I can't help being who I am. Believe me, I have tried to change, to become a more conventional Christian. 

Compared with the OT stories I think it more likely that the gospel accounts are substantially true. It is apparently better documented than most things back then that a man we call Jesus lived, was crucified and started a sect we now call Christianity. Less well attested but hard to to dismiss are the claims of miracles and in particular the Resurrection. Of course, whether you or I think this or think that will not change what actually happened. It would be the ultimate arrogance to think otherwise. But some things in the here and now can be analysed. Here is a Sunday School favourite I have sung since a child:

I serve a risen Saviour, He's in the world today
I know that He is living, whatever men may say
I see His hand of mercy, I hear His voice of cheer
And just the time I need Him He's always near

He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life's narrow way
He lives, He lives, Salvation to impart
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.

But I don't. I don't "hear His voice of cheer". I like to think that "He walks with me" but I do not know that he "talks with me" although I wish and constantly pray that I did. And those last two lines: that my proof that he lives today should be that he "lives in my heart": I do not even know what this means, or is it some sort of meaningless, gooey but feel-good poetic license?

I can, I guess I do, accept the divinity of this man Jesus and the Plan of Salvation that he wrought and its personal adoption by the likes of me by accepting the offer "by faith". And that so doing gives me meaning for living, a foundation to build upon.

I note that the act of "becoming a Christian", which evangelicals metamorphous into "four spiritual laws" or the language of the above song, was simple in the case of the Philippian jailer: Then he brought them out and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" And they said, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." 

(continued in Part 5)             (go back to Part 3)  

Winchester cathedral

Winchester cathedral

Winchester cathedral, notable for being one of the largest cathedrals in England, with the longest nave and greatest overall length of any Gothic cathedral in Europe, and Jane Austin's burial place, and that we trooped there once a year for the Peter Symonds founder's day service as requested in his will dated 20 April 1586. On one occasion I did a tour of its interior and remember the various ages of the building being explained: the oldest parts being the transepts with Norman-style round arches. The tour included climbing hidden spiral staircases and walking along a gang-way above the nave ceiling and being able to peep through holes to the nave beneath. Based on a nave width of about 14m (see plan and picture below), I estimate those holes to be about 3" in diameter.

Jane Austin - in memory

Not that Jane Austin does much for me. I do not think I have read any of her novels.

Winchester cathedral plan showing different ages

This is actually Salisbury cathedral but a similar idea

Peep hole in Winchester cathedral's nave ceiling

Another memory from school days is being berated by a history master for not knowing more of my local heritage specifically about the cathedral. Strange how one has to go to a foreign city to get interested enough to check out all its history. In a similar way I was blissfully unaware that my hometown was (and presumably still is) the centre of watercress production in the UK.

Classic multivibrator circuit

Oh - and the electronics shop. In Market Lane between the High Street and the cathedral was a small shop displaying electrical wares in its window. Inside was hardly a space to stand between shelves of stuff and equipment waiting to be repaired or collected. The owner, an older man, would sell you just one resistor if that's all you wanted, or would help you chose parts from his stock to make a simple design you offered. Like a multivibrator. It was of course my favourite Winchester shop.

The Buttercross, High Street

Apart from the Cadena cafe near the Buttercross. My mother would sometimes treat us and we would typically order mushrooms or cod's roes on toast. And their coffee ice cream, served in a metal bowl, was magical.

Temporary roof scaffolding

Back to the subject, this year they have been restoring the roofing, an operation which entails removing all the lead, melting it down and recasting for re-use.

When the Normans built Winchester Cathedral the area was basically a swamp.  To provide a foundation they placed a multilayer platform of beech trees over the peat of the bog.  Essentially the cathedral was built on a large raft that “floated” on a layer of sponge like peat.

Sound II sculpture

Not surprisingly the crypt floods each winter and there is now a sculpture of a figure entitled Sound II, designed to stand in water.

William Walker saviour

William Walker was the man who saved Winchester cathedral from collapse due to the wooden foundations rotting. A leading diver of his day who had trained at Portsmouth's naval dockyard, he worked tirelessly from 1906 until 1911 supporting the cathedral using more than 25,000 bags of concrete, 115,000 concrete blocks and 900,000 bricks. He worked in almost complete darkness in the peaty water up to 5m above his head.

Gospel Oak between Winchester and Alresford

Just to the north of the A31 half way between Winchester and my hometown Alresford lies Hempage wood and somewhere therein (though I have never seen it) is the Gospel Oak. This is how the story goes:

"William the Conqueror granted Walkelin as many trees in Hempage Wood as he could fell in three days, wherewith to roof the nave. The bishop called together carpenters innumerable and swept off the whole wood of oak trees, leaving nothing standing there save the traditional 'Gospel Oak' under which St. Augustine is said to have preached. The bare stem of this ancient oak still stands, and by it yearly, when bounds were beaten, the parish priest used to read, till quite lately, the gospel for the day. The solid trees thus carried to Winchester are still to be seen in the roof of the nave above Wykeham's stone groining, and they are as sound as when they were first hoisted up more than eight centuries ago, in 1086." Next time William Rufus (son of above) visited he is believed to have said: Have I gone mad? Surely I had a most delightful wood near Winchester?

Gospel Oak ~ 1920

Walkelin began work on a new cathedral church, the current Winchester Cathedral, in 1079. His transepts and crypt, though little else, are retained in the present building. The new cathedral was completed in 1093. Walkelin had caused its tower to be made as it is still to be seen (At the annalist's time, though the present tower is a later Norman construction).

Why were the mighty cathedral built? Ken Follett, author of  The Pillars of the Earth, says "But I come back again and again to the people who built the cathedrals. Those men and women were by modern standards, poor and ignorant. They lived in wooden huts and slept on the floor. Yet they created the most beautiful and awesome buildings the world has ever known. Human beings have the capacity to rise above mundane circumstances and touch the eternal."

The pictures in this post are not my own.