“A Church Should Look Like a Church” by G.M. Baker

 

An excerpt from Ordinary Eccentricity: A travel memoir

 May 6, 2018, Amarillo

Today is a rest day. I go to Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle church and find the building not to my liking. It is a typical modern auditorium-style church with padded pews. The floor slopes down to the sanctuary like the floor of a movie theatre. It is all about making sure that everyone has a good view. If in the pre-Vatican II days, we said that we went to hear Mass; now we go to see Mass.

I don’t like churches that are built this way. There are endless articles complaining about the ugliness of modern suburban churches. But ugliness is not really the issue here. The building is not really ugly, inside or out. It is not a work of outstanding beauty, but it is not ugly. But it feels more like an auditorium than a church as if the only purpose of the building was to give you a good view of the play being performed on the stage.

St. Thomas the Apostle Church

Is there anything more to a church than that? Is it just a place to watch a performance? A lot more, I would suggest. It is, of course, a dwelling place for the blessed sacrament and a place to come for private prayer, but those things don’t have any particular architectural requirements in themselves. No, it’s more than that. The church is not just a container for other things or activities; it is itself a sacred object and a sacred space. The sanctuary is certainly the heart of the church, but the whole of it is a sacred space, and every organ and limb of it matters.

Consider the difference between a classical or gothic church and an auditorium or theatre. Most modern auditoriums are designed mainly with acoustics in mind, the angles and furnishing of the walls designed to serve the ear rather than the eye. Whether the effect is visually pleasing or not is a secondary consideration at best. An older theatre, or opera house in particular, may be ornately decorated, but that ornamentation has one purpose: to express luxury and wealth. It does not tell a story. It says, we are the rich, and this is a place for the wealthy. For all that this ornamentation flatters the patrons as they assemble, when the performance begins, the house goes dark (there are never any windows), and only the stage is lit. It is all about the performance.

Interior of the Basilica of Santa Croce (Florence)

In a traditional church, there are windows, and those windows not only cast light into the main body of the church they are also filled with marvelous pictures and patterns in stained glass. The walls are often painted with religious art as well. There are stations of the cross around the church walls. There are statues, tombs, side altars, and baptismal fonts. Look up, and the ceiling too is painted, or at least richly decorated.

Of course, such ornamentation is not created without wealth. But the ornamentation is not designed to flatter but to instruct and to inspire. It may perhaps proclaim the wealth of its patrons, but it does not boast the wealth of its worshipers, who may come from every rank and station of life.

An important feature of the Gothic church, in particular, is its height. It draws the eye upward, and when the eye is drawn upward, it is rewarded by the splendor of the walls and the ceiling. Why upward? Because it is human to raise our eyes in awe and homage. We may not be so naïve as to think heaven is literally over our heads, but the eye nevertheless turns upward in both reverence and aspiration. In drawing our eyes upward, a great church inspires us to do both.

Cologne Cathedral

Now, you might say that it is unfair to compare a suburban church, even an evidently wealthy one like St. Thomas, with the world’s great cathedrals. But my old parish church, St. Patrick’s, in Ottawa, Canada, was built in the 19th century for Irish lumberjacks. St. Ninian’s Cathedral in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where I went to school and university, was built for fishermen and foresters, and they have the same shape, the same aspiration, the same distinction of purpose and character as any great cathedral, albeit on a smaller scale. There are many such churches in neighborhoods all over the world. If we could build them then, why can we not build them now?

St. Patrick's Ottawa

The point is not that every church should be a soaring gothic cathedral but that every church building should look and feel like a church building, not like a movie theatre with some church furniture in it. While it has the usual furniture of a church—organ pipes, stations of the cross, altar, tabernacle—St. Thomas in Amarillo looks more like a lecture hall than a church. If your eyes were drawn upward, though there is nothing to draw them in that direction, all your eyes would see would be white stucco peppered with pot lights, which is just what you would see in a lecture hall.

A church should proclaim that it is a sacred space, which means it should proclaim, in every piece of wood, glass, and stone, that it is a place where man comes nearer to God—as near as we can come in this life. This is what the sanctuary lamp reminds us of in every church, but given adequate resources, everything in the design and decoration of the building should proclaim the same message. Wherever the eye falls, it should see the same message proclaimed.

This means that a church is different from other kinds of buildings. Nothing else (save perhaps the temples of other faiths) expresses the same message or the same purpose. The great gothic cathedrals were not an imitation of any style of secular buildings, past or present. They were a thing wholly apart in their time as in ours, and their apartness was reflected in smaller churches, down to the humblest village church as well. To enter them was to be moved to silence, to look upon and contemplate the eternal. To enter them, then as now, was not to step back in time but to step out of time.

A Sanctuary Lamp is a shared feature of churches and synagogues.
In Hebrew, it's known as the Ner Tamid, the Eternal Light

Again, this is not about beauty; it is about a church being church shaped. Nor is it to suggest that there is one single church shape or that that shape is Gothic. It is rather to say that a church should immediately strike you as a place set apart, a place with a purpose not worldly, a place not belonging to any one race or class of man. And that this should be proclaimed by the whole church, not just one part of it.

The whole church should be church shaped. It could be a shape different from any church shape we have seen before, but its shape should immediately shout to us that it is a church and could be nothing else. A church is a sacred space in the whole, and it should feel like that, every inch. A tourist of no faith should enter a church and stand for a moment in a kind of wonder, as sense of having walked through a door into another world.

This does not require great size or any kind of shock and awe; it merely requires that sense of differentness, of entering a place set apart from the ordinary tasks and entertainments of life. Even if the tourist does not recognize or comprehend its purpose, they should feel at once that its purpose is other.

There is some question about the purpose of stone circles. I think it unlikely that we will ever get definitive proof of any of the many theories of their construction and intent. They are simply too far from us in time. But when you stand at Castlerigg Stone Circle in Cumberland, UK,  for example, you will know its purpose at once as you look around at the mist gathered on the surrounding hills.

Chris Charlesworth / Castlerigg stone circle

This is a place where men are closer to the gods. It is a raised place that is surrounded by higher hills on all sides. It is a place that is undeniably numinous. It is impossible, to my eye at least, not to see why it was chosen and what it meant to the people who built it. You should feel that same sense when you enter a church, even if the sanctuary lamp means nothing to you. Every church should be an oddity in this sense, an ordinary eccentricity.

I don’t doubt that God is also present at the multiplex, in the ordinary sense that God is present everywhere. But nothing about the multiplex conspires to remind me of this. The multiplex is not a place dedicated to God, not a place where time and eternity intersect. It is a space with a function but not an identity. Ugliness is not the issue. It is the creation of a space that proclaims itself a place set apart, a place located between the world and eternity. I’m not sure that such a place could be anything but beautiful. But beauty is not the point.

***

G. M. (Mark) Baker was born in England to a teamster's son and a coal miner's daughter and now lives in Nova Scotia with his wife, no dogs, no horses, and no chickens. He prefers driving to flying, desert vistas to pointy trees, and quiet towns to bustling cities. 

As a reader and as a writer, he does not believe in confining himself to one genre. He writes about kind abbesses and melancholy kings, about elf maidens and ship wreckers and shy falconers, about great beauties and their plain sisters, about sinners and saints and ordinary eccentrics. In his newsletter Stories All the Way Down, he discusses history, literature, the nature of story, and how not to market a novel. 

To date, Mark’s written seven novels and one travel memoir, Ordinary Eccentricity. You can read more about his books here.

For more short stories, poetry, and essays by you fellow writers see here (and scroll down).

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