St Cuthbert’s stood strong and fortified on a raised piece of ground. Its walls were thick concrete, ramparts for God.  Elysian defences. From its vantage one could gaze out at the Slaves of Satan across the street. Perhaps it was all the more reason for the thickness of the walls. When the stout church was born it hatched from the wooden structure before it. Concrete was poured and layered around the existing shrine; a roof cut off the view to the heavens. When the metamorphosis was complete the old wood chapel was peeled away from within, a reverse cicada for Jesus. Dead wood purged for new concrete.
The end came with an earthquake, an ‘act of god’, it’s probably best the congregation doesn’t ponder that one too closely. Off to St Tom’s down the road, a church that suffers the indignity of neighbouring the true temple of our time, where the cross is bent to golden arches, where the queues on a Sunday morning stretch down the road. The burger divine.