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The Road To Coventry
Jebb's Journal 1-8-25
Caleb

By CALEB FOX

 

Within three months abroad in the U.K. I had written 33,000 words of academic essays, so no wonder it took me all of those three months to write another column for the trio of newspapers, The Leader, Times and News. Those 33,000 words made up fifteen essays that spanned from Freudian psychology to Russian nihilism to metatheatrical absurdism and other various Christian themes. Even though I was writing these essays, I could not figure out what to write another column on. I had so many adventures to choose from. I could have written about France, Italy, or Scotland. However, I did not.

Instead, I wrote about a trip to Coventry Cathedral on December 11, 2024. Now, this is not just a retelling of events. It is a story. A story that starts with a song: The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s “Hellfire” clung to my lips as I slowly woke up in my Christmas decorated room. Soon, I remembered that the bus to Coventry would leave in twenty minutes. I let Frolo encourage me to my feet, and suddenly, twenty minutes later, I was sitting in a small minivan with an eccentric British man who was far too invested in American politics. Next to my friend in the minivan, I picked up The Sickness unto Death and found myself reading about despair on the road to Coventry. Bumpy as it may be, Kierkegaard helped drown out each shake the old minivan produced. Eventually, however, Kierkegaard had to be slipped away into the black mesh pocket attached to the seat before me because the athletic Michael, with his spear towards God, came into view. The cold Coventry air crowded the van’s cabin as the door swung open, and for a moment, it made me miss the warm country air that I was used to. I call it a moment, but it felt like a lifetime with the dreamlike cold on my fingertips. However, I soon ignored the cold and faced the grand glass screen of patterned-boney angles that introduced the Cathedral. Our tour guide, whose name never became important enough to remember, welcomed us outside the grand screen and shuffled us into the Cathedral. “The Litany,” the tour guide said as we sat on the liturgical furniture that littered the Cathedral floor. He explained in detail what the Litany was, but I was too worried about the blonde girl beside me, who always seemed to bring more interesting conversations to my lips. After the Litany was breathed by the Countress, the blonde girl, the rest of my American classmates, and I wandered underneath the porch to the ruined Cathedral across the way.

The ruined Cathedral looked exactly like what one would think of a bombed building: broken. A charred cross, made from burnt roof beams, was stuffed in a bucket of sand and echoed the word of the day, hellfire.

As I hummed the macabre melody, the tour guide herded us back toward the new Cathedral. While I walked through it, I could not help but think of my home church.

Something about the walls. The light. The space. I still cannot entirely place it. But as I slowly started to feel at home, I got swept away towards lunch and stepped outside the Cathedral, facing the cold that made me miss the country’s warm weather.

After lunch, we returned to the minivan to visit another church, Saint Matthew’s. On the way, I wrote a poem about it. When I got there, I thought about the poem. And when I left, I thought about the poem some more. Saint Matthew’s was pretty, but it was not Coventry; it was not even close.

After that, I went back to Cambridge. In the minivan with the anything-but-apolitical British man. Writing an article that I am not sure will be published. And suddenly I remembered that in ten days I would go home. Three months in a blink. And for some reason, I could only think about how I would manage to sleep on that plane.

And now, after all of this is done, these 686 words are somehow my favorite.

 

Caleb ‘Jebb’ Fox spent this past summer working as a staff reporter for The Oakdale Leader, The Riverbank News and The Escalon Times. He went back to college in September and traveled abroad; sharing this column upon his return to the U.S.