Friday, March 24, 2006
Beauty And Worship Space
Glenn Lucke, points to a Reggie Kidd post asking about thoughts on designing a new "worship space." Quoting Kidd's post
A couple of weeks ago, I riffed off a post at the blog Glenn roots, Common Grounds Online, on the role that beauty plays in spirtual formation. John Cunningham wrote the CGO post and said, in part
I was a very much a person in the "functional" school of church design until I began to travel in Europe and see some of the incredible houses of worship that were constructed there in days gone by. I was particularly struck in the Soviet Union where they no longer operated as a church at all, but were considered only museums, yet so often I found myself practically driven to my knees by the palpable presence of God. The beauty of those places, created in God's name, made God Himself more easily accessible.
Oh sure, the old puritan in me saw the extraordinary expenditure and winced a bit, but that wince was quickly overwhelmed.
Worship is about placing ourselves as close to God's presence as possible. If a beautiful and purpose-built space can assist with that effort, then it is not, in any fashion, a waste of money.
Related Tags: beauty, worship space, sanctuary, church, evocation
Max Weber begins his analysis of the relationship between "the Protestant ethic" and ?the spirit of capitalism? by noting the way Calvinism (my theological heritage) championed this world as being a legitimate venue of discipleship. The cobbler and the cleric became spiritual equals, as did merchant and monk.The issue to my mind is not one of 'sacred' or 'holy' but an issue of evocative of God. A worship space should be a place where it is easier to approach the Throne of Grace than in the ordinary, if yet sacred, world that we find ourselves in on a daily basis.
But Weber ends his analysis with the complaint that in the aftermath of the declaration that "everything is holy," Calvinism has left us in an "iron cage" where nothing is holy. Weber gave us the converse insight to Dostoevsky?s dictum, "If God is dead, it?s not that people will believe in nothing, but that they will believe in anything." For Weber, the consequence for believers? making everything sacred, is that in practice they allow themselves to hold nothing as sacred.
A couple of weeks ago, I riffed off a post at the blog Glenn roots, Common Grounds Online, on the role that beauty plays in spirtual formation. John Cunningham wrote the CGO post and said, in part
As Christians, we believe that beauty does matter, and that it is more than "aesthetic appreciation." It is also not something that can be grasped by human aspiration; it must be received as a gift. While the Greeks sought to ascend to beauty through contemplation, Christians believe that beauty was bestowed upon us in creation and was given in its fullest form in the Incarnation. We believe that God is both beautiful and Beauty itself, so that the Greeks were right to recognize an innate hunger for beauty (eros) in human beings. They were also wise to realize that humans must be enculturated into beauty, through acculturation into the community. Christian formation is a disciplined inhabitation beauty.As I said in my post of a couple of weeks ago, finding God in beauty is the experience C.S. Lewis called being "Surprised By Joy."
I was a very much a person in the "functional" school of church design until I began to travel in Europe and see some of the incredible houses of worship that were constructed there in days gone by. I was particularly struck in the Soviet Union where they no longer operated as a church at all, but were considered only museums, yet so often I found myself practically driven to my knees by the palpable presence of God. The beauty of those places, created in God's name, made God Himself more easily accessible.
Oh sure, the old puritan in me saw the extraordinary expenditure and winced a bit, but that wince was quickly overwhelmed.
Worship is about placing ourselves as close to God's presence as possible. If a beautiful and purpose-built space can assist with that effort, then it is not, in any fashion, a waste of money.
Related Tags: beauty, worship space, sanctuary, church, evocation
