We Make Our Buildings and Our Buildings Make Us

Driving to work one day recently I was listening to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge under the direction of Sir David Willcocks singing the sixteenth-century English composer William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus.  I have sung this piece, and from personal experience can testify how difficult Byrd’s polyphony can be to perform well a capella.  At cuius latus, I was struck by how gentle and caressing Byrd’s phrases are.  The music conjured late medieval images of the grieving women observing the taking down of the body of Jesus from the cross. 

From my earliest memories, art, and particularly music, has been the gateway to the deepest religious feeling, the door to what Friedrich Schleiermacher famously identified as a sense of utter dependence on the source of all.

In his Dawn and Decadence, Columbia historian Jacques Barzun confirms that my experience has been shared by many through the ages.  Most medieval people didn’t think about theology or philosophy.  But the socially-constructed world of medieval Christendom, with its theological grid, simply was reality, and the reality was reinforced by art and story. What medieval Cathedrals, for example, communicated to average people about God, the soul and the nature and destiny of human beings was portrayed vividly in a space that virtually everyone shared. Depth of meaning within this shared world was accessible through art – plastic, musical and literary – and architecture.

Something like this deepening was vouchsafed to me as a child through pictures, books that were read to me and that I read, poetry my grandfather recited from memory, music, movies, buildings and the language of great public orators like FDR, Churchill, JFK, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Senator Everett Dirksen.

Not long ago I attended a dedication service in one of Charlotte’s spotless new Protestant church sanctuaries.  As I settled into my pew, I wondered how much soul-deepening is being conveyed to parishioners by this building and its contents.  The design of the structure is an apt expression of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ of culture paradigm.  It is a shiny, high-tech, pre-fab, industrially manufactured facility.  It was planned for American suburbanites and their idea of what a place to worship should be.  Although the pastor spoke about the holy that day, and referred to the interior space as set apart for an experience of the numinous, I did not sense anything of the sort. God seemed not to be home. As I tried to identify what exactly was awry, two things came to mind:  the omnipresence of factory-manufactured metallic fixtures and electronic conveniences of every kind, and the relative absence of natural woods and fibers. 

The processional cross, for example, was a factory-made, metallic Christus Rex.  Synthetic carpet throughout the room – it covered both the aisles and the floor under the pews and chairs – said these good people believe in practicality and economy – but, and this is important, not simplicity – above all. Both the pastor and the head usher cautioned worshippers against bringing substances into the space that might mar or stain. Praise bands featured well-amplified electronic instrumentation.  What was absent were natural materials, acoustic instrumentation, simplicity of appointment, silence experienced communally as preparation for being addressed by the transcendent through scripture and sacrament and the spirit of human kindness. These things might have invited a sense of the numinous, might have provided context for the possibility of such an experience. But they were absent. And I missed them.

Interior of Third Haven Friends Meeting House in Easton, Maryland, circa 1684.