I stumbled into a conversation recently in which I heard, “Well, they say that the people are the Church, while the building is just a building.” I hesitated and mumbled something that indicated some level of disagreement. I could have said (should have said), “The building is a sacrament – it matters.”
In a neighboring town, a non-descript brick building beside an interstate highway (also non-descript) bore large letters facing the road that proclaimed, “Church of Christ meet here.” It is an anti-building sign on an anti-building building – without beauty, without significance. The grammar of the sign said it all. In a normal American-English construction, Church requires a singular verb: Church of Christ Meets Here. But the sentence is changed in order to say that “Church” is a plural noun (just a collection of individuals). So, the Church Meet Here. I have little to say about the denomination, the Church of Christ, other than to note that it’s founder was apparently as fond of John Locke as he was of the Bible.
Poor Notre Dame in Paris managed to re-open last week. Few buildings have suffered as much over their history. I’ll not retrace the many insults it has endured. Jonathan Glancey wrote in a recent article: https://unherd.com/2024/12/notre-dame-wont-save-macrons-soul/
The mob [at the time of the French Revolution] in their Jacobin caps stormed Notre-Dame. Early 13th-century statues of 28 Kings of Judea adorning the west facade were wrenched down and decapitated. The baying anti-clerics mistook them for kings of France. The interior of the cathedral was looted and then used, among other secular purposes, as a wine depot. In November 1793, a pointedly paganistic Festival of Reason was held in the nave.
Under Napoleon, the building was being refitted in the style of a Corinthian temple with the name “Temple to the Glory of the Grand Army.” Perhaps it should have read: “Glory of the Grand Army Meet Here.” It was eventually spared and slowly restored to its earlier shape. The fate(s) of Notre Dame is perhaps a “sacrament” of Western Christianity itself.
I love Church buildings. My childhood experience of Church was non-descript – the religion it housed was non-descript. It was an anti-building building. It was as a teen-ager that I first saw a beautiful Church building. It was a 19th century American Gothic construction, a product of the romanticism of that time, a longing for a lost, medieval past. It awoke within me a longing I had never known before – that’s the power of a sacrament.
Orthodoxy’s “theology” of Church buildings is largely driven by a sense that the building (and the Liturgies within it) is a reflection of heaven. God gave Moses very specific instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, saying, “See that you build it according to the [heavenly] pattern that was shown to you.” That pattern eventually shaped the Temple(s) in Jerusalem, which, in turn, shaped the Church buildings built by Christians. That there was a heavenly pattern is significant. It says that our instinct regarding architecture has a spiritual component. In buildings, we are looking to make visible something that is invisible. Much the same can be said of the whole Christian life.
Our culture has largely lost the language of sacrament. With that loss comes an inability to describe the fullness of our experience. To say a Church is “majestic” or “awe-inspiring” states the obvious – that can be nothing more than a function of big or vertical. We have lost its narrative and the vocabulary that belongs to it.
I visited Stonehenge some years ago. Oddly, I happened to be there a day or so after the Summer Solstice. There were predictable crowds of oddly-dressed, self-identifying “pagans.” We stood around the megaliths, all equally clueless. Whatever the builders of this amazing structure thought they were doing, none of us knew. There were, doubtless, a host of opinions, but no knowledge. Today, the structure is a sacrament only of a lost world and our own imaginations.
In that same journey, I also visited the ruins of a former abbey (England has many of these, evidence of a once violent Protestantism and a greedy king). I knew the narrative of the ruins. I knew where to stand and where not to tread. A said a silent prayer for the monastics who were martyred there.
In truth, our buildings (Churches and homes, as well) can only do so much. The sacraments bring us grace, but we bring something of ourselves. We do not live without buildings, but it is best when the inner and the outer reflect one another.
St. Gregory of Nyssa offered thoughts to a friend who wanted direction on the notion of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Such pilgrimages were only in their infancy in the 4th century. His thoughts are significant:
Before we saw Bethlehem we knew [that Christ was] made man by means of the Virgin; before we saw His Grave we believed in His Resurrection from the dead; apart from seeing the Mount of Olives, we confessed that His Ascension into heaven was real. We derived only thus much of profit from our travelling there, namely that we came to know by being able to compare them, that our own places are far holier than those abroad. Wherefore, O you who fear the Lord, praise Him in the places where you now are. Change of place does not affect any drawing nearer unto God, but wherever you may be, God will come to you, if the chambers of your soul be found of such a sort that He can dwell in you and walk in you. But if you keep your inner man full of wicked thoughts, even if you were on Golgotha, even if you were on the Mount of Olives, even if you stood on the memorial-rock of the Resurrection, you would be as far away from receiving Christ into yourself, as one who has not even begun to confess Him.
Our buildings are significant, even sacramental. Nevertheless, the “building” within the heart is paramount. As sacraments, the structures that surround us can nurture and assist the inward construction or discovery of the mystical temple that is our ultimate resting place – whose builder and maker is God. (Heb. 11:10)
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