Catholic and Loving it!

That Mark Shea is a funny man...

England is a magical far off land that positively bristles with literary, religious, cultural and historical meaning. Here in Seattle, when you park your car, you are just parking your car. When you do it in England, you are parking next to the River Ouse where William Cowper drowned himself in despair that he was not one of Calvin's Elect. When you take a walk in Seattle, you're just taking a walk. When you take a walk in York, you are walking past the Tower where the Jews of York committed mass suicide because a mob of locals decided to kill them in 1170. When you turn a corner, there's the house of St. Margaret Clitherow, right in the middle of the Shambles, a genuine medieval street. Go a couple of blocks over, and there's a Roman column from the camp of Constantine, who was sitting *right there* when word came that he had better hie himself back to Rome if he wanted to be Emperor now that the previous Emperor had died.

And there is York Cathedral: one of the most awesome architectural achievements of the High Middle Ages. We have the Space Needle. Cool, in a Jetsons sort of way. But really, it can't hold a candle to York Cathedral. And when you go inside, you can practically trace the history of the West for the past 800 years or so as you watch the various layers of art and architecture build upon one another. The only way you can trace the last 800 year where I live is by counting rings on old growth trees in the Olympic Rain Forest. History, for Washingtonians, means remembering JP Patches, Stan Boreson, Heart, and Microsoft programs that only required 64K.