The Glory of the Church

I built a cathedral in Minecraft.

I named it St. John Notch, because it was built on land donated from the Notcherani family.

The cathedral measures 64 L x 48 W x 32 H (not including steps or crosses). I had to level a hill in order to build it.

It has a cool dome.

Aside: designing gothic vault intersections is tricky. Do I want to go with a straight intersection? Convex curves? Concave? This took me hours of dithering and trying out different builds and comparisons, and getting the Designing Murloc's opinions. I went with the dome because it was cool.

Plus, it gave me plenty of room for the baldacchino.

The solid gold baldacchino.

The altar linens are white. I was going to change them to green after Pentecost.

It has an old-school, slightly awkwardly placed pulpit...

...communion rails, as does any church worth its salt...

...confessionals...

...choir loft...

...and bells in the bell towers.

I had plans for flying buttresses, a cemetery, catacombs, and subterranean chapels.

It was a work of art. A glorious song, praising the greatness of God. It took me two days to build.

Then the Nothing came.

I don't know exactly what happened, for I wasn't at the computer. See those railways in the lower-left corner? I built an awesome minecart ride. It weaved through an intricate series of mine shafts. Damien loved to watch it, while playing with his trains, so I set it up in a continuous loop and left to go do something else. A shriek from the den informed me that something was amiss.

"Dada! Minecraft's broken!"

By the time I got to the den, the computer was mid-restart. Somehow, it simply shutdown and restarted. When I logged back in, I was in the mine cart, right where I'd left Damien. I stopped the train ride, and left to investigate.

And that's when I found this:

The Nothing ate a hole in my beautiful cathedral, taking the gold tabernacle with it. The sanctuary lamp still shines, as if the virtual body of Christ hasn't been desecrated by the demonic and sacrilegious Nothing.

Now, a gaping maw to the netherworld opens from the floor of my cathedral.

I would simply cover it, and rebuild, but this gaping hole is impenetrable. I can't move into it, or place blocks on it. It is a Void. A Nothing. An Absence in creation.

Approaching it from beneath doesn't work. If I enter the cave network, and try to move into it, I simply "bounce" off.

Likewise, I can't rise above it and build over it. Building arbitrarily high, the moving over it encounters the same dead zone.

Closing and restarting the game does nothing. A quick google shows this is likely unrecoverable, but with a level editor, I might be able to restore the missing chunk to default (which would be the side of a hill). But Minecraft was recently updated, and none of the tools I've been able to find work with the latest version.

I think there's a lesson here about the glory of God being beyond magnificent churches and great art. Cathedrals become old and crumble. Virtual cathedrals vanish with the flip of a bit. But the glory of God reigns eternal.

But I'm just mad that I lost two days of work.