QUESTION: “What’s the most difficult task for a Communist historian?”

ANSWER: “To predict the past.”

Don’t ask me where I read this. It was a Soviet-era joke, I suspect, playing on the notion that the past is shaped by the historian to account for whatever the future slings at us; through reshaping the past, we can cast unfolding events as inevitable. Historians don’t write about the past; they actually write it.

Strangely, Agincourt works pretty much that way, for me at least, since I have the power to imagine the community’s Roman Catholic church, Christ the King, which was built in 1950-1951, without knowing the two buildings that had preceded it. I have, indeed, described the original R.C. parish, Saint Ahab, built about 1862, without actually conceiving the intermediate building which stood from the ’90s until it was replaced by the current church. And even then, I described the first of those three sequential buildings in only the most suggestive language, because I can’t tell you what it looks like, only what it feels like.

Push often does come to shove. And that time has come to show the rest of you what I see dimly in my mind’s myopic eye. The original Saint Ahab’s was implied (more than actually shown) in a piece titled “In hoc signo vinces” in December 2010, very early in the blog’s history.

The church Father Manning conceived grew from childhood experience on the western coast of Ireland; in a fishing village well acquainted with scavenged building materials, the jetsam washed ashore from maritime mishaps. Even now, ten years after that entry, I still have only the vaguest of images in mind: some bizarre hybrid, the illegitimate offspring of a Finnish chapel of 2004 and an eccentric Midwestern house of 1961:

Can you see it? I’m beginning to.