BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE - Bare churches, cold hearts - Catholic church art and architecture - Brief Article

Commonweal, March 24, 2000 by Sidney Callahan

Last week, at our Altar-Rosary Society meeting, I made a heartfelt request that we have vigil candles in church for people to light. Olga, a member who grew up in an Eastern Catholic church, agreed with me, but our request fell flat. The pastor cited the danger of fire, the cost of insurance, and the certainty of theft. I replied that as a rich parish we could afford to offer candles for free. And if we absolutely couldn't have real flames and smoke, electric candles would be better than nothing.

The pastor voiced surprise that I felt so strongly about keeping up this traditional Catholic devotion. My reasons are simple. Like a lot of other post-Vatican II folks in the pews, I miss something in our spare, moderne churches. They often feel downright chilly. Too often the Catholic tradition's witness to material sacramentality seems faint. Warmth, mystery, and transcendence aren't present. If this is a problem without a name, it's also one I don't know how to fix. A simple-minded imitation of the past won't do.

I could not join Camille Paglia's riff praising her childhood parish church with its statue of Saint Lucy offering her eyeballs on a plate. Nor would I want to import the mural I saw in a Spanish chapel which shows a female martyr's chopped-off breasts flying away in the air. Certain Mexican crucifixes come with far too much blood and gore. These, like the display of Saint Catherine of Siena's severed head, err in too grisly a direction. At the opposite extreme, we encounter excessive sentimentality. While worshiping in the small wooden summer chapel at Lake George, I counted fourteen images of Mary and her baby. I admired the excess and the feminine ambience, but the dreadful quality of the mass-produced art spoiled the effect. Even the monumental Marian shrine in Washington, D.C., replete with a plethora of elegant Byzantine images, feels cold and inauthentic to me.

So missy, Quo vadis? Maybe I should concentrate less on my dissatisfactions and focus more on gratitude for how far I've come. As a teen-age convert to serious Christianity, I was a puritanical zealot. Nothing material should stand between God and the individual soul. A silent Quaker meeting was my ideal of worship. During this period I went to a sung high Mass one Christmas Eve, and actually shed tears at the sacrilegious superstition on display. Three priests in gold and silver vestments were bowing and turning round as they chanted the Latin service in a lavishly lit and adorned church. Bah, humbug, away with such pagan rites!

Such was the self-righteous spirit that led Cromwell's troops to smash stained glass and destroy statues all over the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, the English Reformation's violent stripping of the altars influenced generations of American Protestants. My great- grandfather was a predestinarian Baptist preacher in south Alabama. His Shiloh congregation rejected the use of musical instruments as corrupt. Only voices could be raised in song. His small wooden church held no ornamentation, much less fourteen Madonnas.

Having finally grown up and been converted to the sacramental Roman way, I firmly renounce all past iconoclasm and want to go forward-or deeper. But forward does not mean accepting an aesthetic of functional minimalism. I don't want the Catholic church to be Bauhaused (an invented verb referring to ambush by sterile modern architecture). Concrete and glass-filled spaces should be limited to airports and shopping malls. Even our newest upscale mall has softened its modernist aura with atriums, fountains, and statues-befitting a capitalist cathedral. In a real cathedral or church my spirit expands if there are dim corners where worshipers can pray privately before illuminated icons and banks of vigil lights. Flickering lights and flickering prayers ascend together. How marvelous the wartime London churches looked in the movie The End of the Affair. Their glowing transcendent aura made it believable that the heroine might give up her lover for God.

Worshipers attend to a threefold reality. God is in the gathered body of the assembly, God is within, and God dwells in unapproachable light beyond. Vatican II teaches that "in the earthly liturgy we share in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God." Yes, that's it; I have been late in grasping the vision of "the heavenly liturgy." My attention has been focused on the urgent need for justice and equality, in the church and in society. But I see now that it was the magnetic pull of "the Mass as heaven on earth" that brought me into the church and continues to nurture me. Without this transcendent eschatological dimension of worship, fully embodied in art, music, beauty, ritual, and sacred space, Cromwell wins.

Surely, the third Catholic millennium can find a way to renew our art and architecture. Yes, I know that places are made sacred by the celebrations, prayers, and charity of the believers who worship in them. But it also works the other way round: sacred spaces inspire and inform worship. A Mass celebrated on the back of a jeep in a battlefield, or on a linoleum-covered table in a homeless shelter can be true worship. But habitual exposure to the stripped-down aesthetic of a school cafeteria or supermarket presents peculiar difficulties for the spirit. If we can't have Chartres come again, at least we can have good art, good music, and many candles.