Dreamscape..............

When I was a young man I had a very vivid dream; a dream that has haunted me for so many years and now latterly has an echo of reality. Perhaps that is the nature of dreams that in darkness of sleep we somehow connect with eternity where the past and the future become part of the one. I don’t know and therefore the search for truth continues!

Anyway let me get back to the dream. I knew then as I know now that it was a time in the future. It was a warm day with a stunning clear blue sky and I was travelling on a sort of flatbed vehicle on a road that I knew well with people that I didn’t because I had obviously found myself, somehow, in the future. As we travelled it occurred to me that there were no churches which I questioned a companion about. He smiled at me and said that they had all been demolished a while ago. Where the churches once stood, for I remember them being there, was grassland!

A few days ago I was leaving an increasingly traffic gridlocked Plymouth down one of my numerous rat runs and happened to be in Mutley. There was until recently a beautiful old church on a crossroads that had been the core of the local community. Now it’s rough ground with the occasional pile of bricks poking out over the numerous weeds.

That prompted a church search over the next few days. Some that I once knew have been flattened others have become snooker halls, antique shops, private clubs and designer homes. For me it prompted the thought of the generations who worshiped, were hatched, matched and despatched in these once spiritually vibrant buildings.

Sunday those years ago was a time for families to gather and often attend a church service together. There is still that gathering today but not in the churches. Now families gather in the supermarkets which have become the new cathedrals of consumerism where a false feeling of equality is established through the aisles of plenty and the advent of a credit card.

In this apparently Post-Christian era I make no call for a return to the churches but I do make a call for the spiritual energy that we all hold to be liberated in the hope of building more socially cohesive communities in these increasingly troubled times where the neighbourhood gap between those that have and those that have not widens by the day.