LIVERPOOL 2026. THE ANGLICAN CATHEDRAL

The Anglican cathedral makes you feel like a tourist that must say: Wow! How impressive is this. "This", what? A building dedicated to God, the Christian God in its Anglican version. It took a time for the Anglican Church to introduce some of the tenets of the Reformation and always with an ambiguous mood, rather than conviction. At the core of the high church was always Catholicism, the desire to remain Catholic in spite of the Puritanical and iconoclastic tendencies of the lower church. This impressive cathedral took 74 years to be built, from 1904 until 1978. Even though when we approach this overwhelming building it looks like a medieval construction, however it's a modern church serving modern spiritual needs, and these needs are very different in this contemporaneous era than five hundred years ago.

The first impression for this tourist who already inhabits the Artificial Intelligence revolution, who has experienced Protestantism in his hometown as a Plymouth Brethren's believer within a small, self-enclosed community, living among the hardships of a strong National-Catholicism's atmosphere or the dry and militant atheism of a leftist or even liberal political reaction to that monopoly of Catholicism; to this tourist who also went through the tough materialism of the Spanish left; dogmatic and maximalist to the core, at least in appearance, perhaps as a reaction to the Catholic church they left with resentment and a fragile conviction in spite of being the same church the one which spawn the working class movements in their parishes centers for the youth and adults as well. Most of these people in later years became members of the Communist party or turned out being the seedbed of new extreme radical leftist parties or sects.

This tourist entered the cathedral with awe and intense respect. Anytime he visits a town or city in any country in the world he always searches for the spiritual sites, the temples, the churches. He sits on the benches or cushions or stands up withdrawn in silence because there must be a space apart, removed from the busy life, the noise, the prosaic life of work, chronological time and instrumental space, an space dedicated to the unsolved mystery of our world and our existence.

Our entrance to the cathedral should force us to exit our world of virtual reality in which we now live through the mobile. Perhaps we no longer know how to differentiate the real from virtuality. The origin from the copy. The mystery from an already given representation of that mystery. The space in this Anglican cathedral is immense and overwhelming. My Plymouth Brethren's chapel was a small an intimate place where we all knew each other within those iconoclastic and literalists’ walls. Ours was the God of the Holy Scriptures, the reading and spoken words, the spiritual force of those hymns of victory and resurrection. God was the community reading, singing, praying and the symbolism of the holy supper. The world was mainly an immoral place to avoid, a challenge to our peregrination to the real Kingdom of God beyond history. In this cathedral the huge space made you lift your head and mind to discover it was the empty space of a modern hidden God, a space impossible to be filled by our simplicity of imagination, worse still by the scientific and technological world in which we now live; even less by the new theological modalities and variations of the chameleonic Anglican church.

I was present in some of those high ceremonials of the High Church with all its pompous liturgy, their female bishops or gay pastors breaking away from the essence of what those rituals meant in their day. Nothing to object. Within Protestantism every church is free to interpret the Scriptures and the world at will. But the feeling of that modern architecture trying to imitate the old medieval spirituality gave a creepy feeling. No innovation, whatsoever innovation, seems to be able to fill the empty

space of that cathedral. I sat, I watched the altarpiece, the statues never supposed to be represent anything but art. I observed the nave and its central aisle, the vaults, the choir area, the stained-glass windows. I tried to find a living God instead of an abstraction or a figment of imagination or a hidden projection understood in psychoanalyst terms or class-struggle ideology; perhaps in a clinical neurological terminology. Where's the Christian God nowadays? It's a hidden God? Has God incarnated in history? Is God "the other" in misery and suffering and that's all? It sounds all very pious, charitable and humanist, even revolutionary; but also hypocritical and sheer political opportunism. Perhaps even revolutionary. But that space is still empty. It's like a vacuum never possible to be filled with thoughts and words. I guess in the winter they have to heat it with powerful heater systems so the bodies, the human bodies, remain warm waiting for the always instant resurrection of our virtual, never original reality. Living the endless copies of the almost infinite possibilities of informing and interpreting a world which no longer is real, because as soon as all get "incorporated" into the universal application of Artificial Intelligence, then perhaps, we'll be raised into God, or the Hegelian Absolute Spirit, or hell knows what mixture of biological tissues and biotechnology our new heaven and hell could be.