Monday 20 August 2007

Architectural heresy

We went to a church in Scotland that seemed to me to have been designed by a heretic.

It was deliberately flat - the whole aesthetic stressing the horizontal rather than the vertical. The tabernacle was tucked away in a corner. The crucifix did not have Christ Crucified, but rather Risen. There was no central aisle. and so on... In fact in every way it was designed to break with the traditions of Church architecture: traditions which have developed to communicate a sense of the sacred. And the result was that the congregation behaved with no sense of the sacred. They did not genuflect to the tabvernacle, but walked straight past it, bowing oddly in the vague direction of the altar - or the priest? Or the crucifix?... They chatted before and after Mass as though in a coffee shop, and so on....

Chrisitianity is an incarnational religion or it is nothing. Those who commission or design Churches like that either don't understand the implications of that fact or are heretical...

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