In Defense of Ugly Churches

I love beautiful churches.  We definitely need more of them.  Beautiful churches raise the heart and mind to God, the Source of all beauty.  They remind us that we are not made for the mediocrity of the rat race, but for the excellence of heavenly virtues.  Beautiful churches give glory and honor to God, and provide a holy and reverent atmosphere for the Mass, the source and summit of our Christian lives.

And then there are those churches.

Call them minimalist, modern, or whatever, they are stripped bare of all the grandeur that teach reverence and right worship.  We could try to ignore their existence, but there will always be ugly churches around.  Rather than calling for them to be torn down and replaced, I propose that these poor ugly churches can teach us valuable lessons, (for God in his providence can pull good out of anything).  Here are a couple of things on which you can reflect when you walk into an ugly church.

First of all, always remember that Christ Himself is present in every Catholic church.  Wouldn’t He rather you look at the tabernacle and converse with Him than for you to look at the tabernacle and mentally critique its funky design?  Even the most modern church is still made holy and sacred by the presence of Our Lord.  It is for that reason our hearts can always sing “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord, God of Hosts.”  Art is important, but it is only a shadow of True Beauty Himself, Who resides in every single church.

Remember too, when worshiping, that the beauty or grandeur of a mass is not determined by the beauty of the church surrounding it.  Every mass is of infinite worth, and draws its participants into the very heart of redemption.  The words “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood” should be enough for us to be frozen in wonder and awe, more than even St. Peter’s Basilica.  When there is nothing external around to help you concentrate, take it as an invitation to be drawn further into the very heart of the mass, rather than its surroundings.  I have seen many beautiful and respectful masses celebrated in ugly worship spaces.

Though sacred images are stepping stones to contemplation, they are just that – stepping stones.  Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) explains in The Spirit of the Liturgy: “The sacredness of the image consists precisely in the fact that it comes from an interior vision and thus leads us to such an interior vision.  It must be a fruit of contemplation, of an encounter in faith with the new reality of the Christ, and so it leads us in turn into an interior gazing, an encounter in prayer with the Lord.”  If an image is not designed to accomplish this purpose, then it is not really a sacred image.  Notice, then, the intrinsic nature of images as a help and aid, and the language of “leading” that Ratzinger uses.  It is because of our spiritual weakness that we need images to be drawn into relationship into God.  This is not a bad thing; if it was, then the Incarnation would be evil.  However, the spiritually mature realize that relationship with the Lord is much more than what can be seen by the eyes.  I find this section of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters to be especially enlightening on how easily we can forget the true purposes of images.  Written from the viewpoint of a devil, here is a description of the temptations that can spring from this error:

If you examine the object to which [a person in prayer] is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients.  There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation: there will be vaguer – perhaps quite savage and puerile – images associated with the other two Persons…But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it – to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him.  You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer.  For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if he ever consciously directs his prayers “Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be,” our situation is, for the moment, desperate.  Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside, or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it – why, then it is that the incalculable may occur.

Like all the schemes of devils, this temptation twists of the real value of images, but it does highlight very important point: it is God to Whom we direct our prayers, a God Whom we cannot ever know fully.  Sacred images do their best to lead us there, but at a certain point, we must acknowledge their inadequacy and seek a deeper contemplation of the God of all Beauty.

This does not mean we should purposefully build ugly, plain, and minimalist churches.  Churches are an appropriate place for the grandeur and guidance of beauty.  But the deeper meaning of the use of beauty allows us to find lessons in these plain spaces, and to be redirected to the reason we have beautiful churches in the first place.  The next time you go to mass in an ugly church, praise God that He is the only Beauty you will ever need.

Sarah

Why Silence?

“Into Great Silence” is a gorgeous documentary on the lives of the Carthusian monks living at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in France.  To achieve a more accurate depiction of monastery life, there is no narrator, no background music, and only one interview throughout the entire two-and-a-half-hour-long movie.  The viewer sees the monks at prayer and at work in silence, while occasionally a bible verse will be presented as a rhythmic meditation on the call to silence.  The monks live and breathe the presence of God, and their lifestyle exudes an air of holiness.  It is a beautiful documentary of the contemplative life that is held to critical acclaim.  So what did I do when I watched it?

I dozed off.

There is something very irking about silence in my 21st century world, one in which I can listen to music anywhere and anytime, where entertainment is usually loud and on a screen, and I can talk to anyone I want instantly on my phone.  Even in the world of prayer, it’s hard to really be quiet.  Silence seems like such an absence.  How can we learn anything from silence if you can’t hear anything in silence?  It feels like being deaf.  Sometimes the way silence is valued is so mysterious and unfathomable.  It is a particularly troublesome concept for me, for my theology-of-the-body-inundated background recoils at the apparent lack of actions of love of neighbor.  I know in my head that silence must have powerful effects and is a holy way to pray, but it is one of those things that my heart finds difficult to accept.

chartreux.org

I mentioned to a friend that I had watched “Into Great Silence” and my difficulties with paying attention and understanding its concepts.  She is much wiser than I, and said something that put everything right back into perspective.  She pointed me back to the paradox of it all, that silence really is for relationship, a much deeper relationship than what is built on simple, human words.  Silence doesn’t make sense to the world, but it does on a supernatural level.  When we are quiet, that is when relationship deepens the most, because we allow ourselves to simply BE in His presence.  The Carthusian statutes say this on silence:

Our supreme quest and goal is to find God in solitude and silence.  There, indeed, as man with his friend, do the Lord and his servant often speak together; there is the faithful soul frequently united with the Word of God; there is the bride made one with her Spouse; there is earth joined to heaven, the divine to the human.  (Book 2, Chapter 12)

Silence is indeed beautiful because it is a level of supernatural communion.  But because it is supernatural, it is also very difficult, and may seem pointless or dry.  From what I can tell, only those who practice the way of silence really understand its power.  The Carthusian statutes also admit this:

God has led his servant into solitude to speak to his heart; but he alone who listens in silence hears the whisper of the gentle breeze that reveals the presence of the Lord.  In the early stages of our Carthusian life, we may find silence a toilsome burden; however, if we are faithful, there will gradually be born within us of our silence something that will draw us on to still greater silence.  (Book 2, Chapter 14)

Spending time in silence might very well be like making ourselves deaf, but I think it’s important to remember that it is the deaf that Christ makes to hear.  It is He Who will transform our silence into intimacy.  We need not worry that we are not enough.

In the silence of the heart, You speak

And it is there that I will know You

And You will know me.

Dominican Spirituality

As I hinted to before, I have a thing for Dominican spirituality.  The mantra of the Dominicans is “To contemplate, and to give to others the fruit of that contemplation,” which is heard often around the various groups of Dominicans.  From studying and praying to the pulpit and the classroom, Dominicans are constantly being formed and assisting in the formation of others.  A deeper look at the original context of that quote gives some interesting insight to this part-contemplative, part-active religious order.

Let’s start with the original quote: it is “better to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate.”  If you expand the quote a bit to the surrounding sentences, you will find another familiar quote you might not have realized went together with this one: “even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so is it better to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate.”  Sound familiar?  This sentence happens to be in the main body of article 6 of question 188 of the secunda secundae of the one and only Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Check out that Dominican habit

The Dominican “slogan” obviously has a lot more to it than just a nice-sounding saying, for it is rooted in a theological work.  The specific question Aquinas was addressing when he came up with this principle was “whether a religious order that is devoted to the contemplative life is more excellent than one that is given to the active life?”

Like all the other articles of the Summa, the question is set up in “objections, answer, and response” format.  This particular question is interesting because Aquinas answers that a mixed order is the most excellent instead of choosing between one or the other.  However, Aquinas begins by listing objections from the side of the active life being the most excellent, and responds with “on the contrary, our Lord said that the “best part” was Mary’s, by whom the contemplative life is signified.”  Now, because the eventual answer would be a mixed order, it seems like Aquinas could have started with arguments for contemplative spiritualities in the objections and then countered with an answer for active spiritualities.  But he chose to have the response point to the “best part” that is contemplation, and this is significant.  Dominican spirituality is not really a “mixed spirituality”; it is a active spirituality which flows from contemplation as its source.  Without the wellspring of contemplation, Dominican spirituality wouldn’t make any sense.  It would be a spirituality that tried to do too much and lacked a focus.  But since it acknowledges that the “best part” is the contemplation embodied by Mary at the feet of Jesus, it can succeed in teaching and preaching.

It is better to enlighten than just to shine, but you can only shine in the first place if you have light.  Whenever you have a principle that follows the “Catholic And,” there is always going to be a reason for the inclusiveness.

Sarah