A Fantasy of the End

As neither I nor Ms Formerly Aldgate had ever seen Cinema Paradiso we watched it over a couple of evenings this week. This post isn't about the movie, but about thoughts provoked by the scene of the demolition of the cinema building, towards the end. 

The film makes clear the emotions embedded in the destruction of the cinema, how it represents a nostalgia for a past world, memory, and experience; things the characters have shared, not all of them positive, but all important, having made them who they are. The loss of the cinema means that those experiences retreat into the internal world of memory, and become even more fragile. So in the real world we often strive to preserve elements of our built environment, less for their utility or attractiveness (though we might justify it in those terms) than because they provide continuity, remind us of who we are, a shared landscape of meaning and understanding - a code for things we don't have to keep explaining to each other. Churches are converted into housing, art galleries, or businesses, in an effort to keep them around, for instance. 

I imagined watching the ruin of Swanvale Halt church, which could indeed happen within my lifetime - who knows? Would it be converted to another use, or simply done away with? Which would be more painful? Because as much as we tell ourselves 'the Church is the people and not the building', the building makes concrete the relationships between those people, it is one of the crucial things they share, the sign of the God they all serve and work for. It suggests the souls that have worshipped before you, and those who might come after. But if there are not going to be any coming after, how would that feel? I imagine I could give thanks for the work the church had done in the past, and the real role it (and we) had played in proclaiming and living in the Kingdom. Those things are not lost no matter what might happen. And the Church always continues, in other forms, because the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. It's the human relationships, including relationships with God, that matter; but we are flesh and blood too, and the death of one way of expressing those relationships, the way we had got used to and understood, could never be less than painful.