Architectural Indigestion

The last two Sundays, when I turned on NPR after church in the evening, the story I tuned into was on both occasions relevant to things I had been contemplating that day. This is not a blog about religion, but the topic does come up every now and then - if, I freely confess, primarily to blame the Calvinists for everything I can't blame on the Beats.

Today just before leaving, I was preoccupied with the topic of sacred architecture and, to a lesser extent, religious art, ornamentation, and sacramentals within a church building: in other words, the totality of the physical presence of a constructed sacred space. There are as many schools of thought on this as there are believers, non-believers, architects and art-haters. But there are two traditional purposes sacred architecture strives to fill: to present an invitation to the faithful and to the stranger, and to provide a physical, lisible symbolic representation of the individual's journey from the profane to the sacred. Now, NPR's story when I was driving back was about reconceiving and refashioning the newsroom not the chapel, but what it illustrates is that architecture is important, it can serve or hinder its putative goals, and that we, the victims or beneficiaries of an architect's design, do notice and are affected by the space.

What got me on to it first was writing about some of the perhaps surprisingly numerous shared beliefs of the Friends and Catholics. While every Christian church has some genetic resemblance to all others, there is not only serious doctrinal difference to address in comparing them, but also the subtler distinctions in emphasis among all the various ideas they still share. In other words, it's not just huge things like 'faith v. works' or literalness v. historicity, but how much stress is put on certain tenets at the expense of which other ones.

Now, the anti-clerical Friends may seem to be the furthest from the hugely organized Catholic Church - and yet in reality they both place tremendous emphasis on the need for individual discernment. Encyclicals and other writings, with increased vigor after Vatican II, insist over and over on the importance of an informed, passionate, and active laity, the need to question and to search for answers, and the importance of being an activist when convinced of the appropriateness of that course. Both churches, as well, lay tremendous stress on justice, including social justice, which is conceived in both traditions as emanating from and being necessitated by the fact of utter, radical equality among all people. The language is different, but the message is the same.

As fascinating as all that is (to me), one place there is a huge difference is in how meeting spaces are viewed by the two groups, which makes sense as they are meant to do different things. And I have no intention of going into that in any depth. But a Quaker meeting-house does not strive to invite, as do churches of most other Protestant and Catholic traditions, nor does it attempt to lay out a narrative or an argument, except of simplicity and the concept of the inner light within all present and all without. Friends would say we glorify God through our actions, and too many, or too-richly-decorated, things around distract us from the real issue, which is 'what are we going to do/ what does God want us to do?' Friends likewise assert that, rightly lived, life is worship, and if simplicity is integral to one's life, this value should of course carry over into meeting halls and the worship meetings within them.

I haven't given much of an explanation there, but it makes sense in a Quaker context. It does not make sense in the context of regular Protestantism, or in Catholic or Orthodox traditions, where the physical church is meant to inspire awe, create an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity, and lead us to contemplate the glory of God, a glory which exceeds that of the gilt and the plainchant, but which can be symbolized by them - by things we can apprehend through our senses and intellect. This, too, has an elegant and coherent logic, to which I'm also giving short shrift.

Additionally, in their beauty, churches, temples, mosques, and cathedrals are meant to invite the sinner in, that he might be led through beauty to Beauty. Again, part of the logic is that the place one worships God should celebrate His wonder through the highest efforts of human labor, and that being drawn to beauty is a noble and God-given trait - but since it is also true that humans like sparkly things, offering them a few in the place of worship is one way to help them keep coming back, in the hope that eventually more substantive things and a more mature understanding of the fullness of the religion will serve the same purpose.

However, even if you are not a beginner, there is something to be said for a holy space that looks like a holy space (unless you belong to a faith like the Friends within which this would make no sense). And I don't care if you believe in God or not, if you enter the Blue Mosque or the Hagia Sophia, a Thai temple or a Zen garden, the results of the care taken to evoke the majesty of the unknowable and the ineffable makes you believe in something. We were given our senses in the same package as we were given our minds, and unless you follow Mani or Mr. Calvin, I fail to see why punishing those senses in worship is necessary.

And that is my main point: the 1960s were regrettable. The 1960s were painful. The 1960s should have stuck to social reform and left style and design alone. That era is my proof that reincarnation does not happen, as I can attest that had I lived before, I would have done so much good in my life that not only would I not have been born when I would have had to witness the horrific legacy the decade wrought in the arts - but I would have taken every prophylactic precaution possible to ensure that my karma be so great that none of it would even have been perpetuated! So, since I'm here now, I wasn't here then, and the best I can do is to try to avoid imagining those puffy ladies' hats, those square ladies' suits, the clunky low heeled parsons' pumps with squared-off toes and ridiculous buckles, and the hideous architecture that evoked not so much the Great American Century as the Supreme Soviet. If I want to worship, I don't want to do it in a place that looks like the People's Recreation Hall and Refectory at Reeducation Center 29! There is a fairly crappy YMCA up the road, and a disastrous, menacing Albertsons a bit further on; I can always go to one of those if I need to savor a bit of Stalinist-gymnasium ambiance. I don't need to do it at church.