Rending the Temple Veil: Holy Space in Holy Community
by Donald Schell
Personal Stories and Stories of Our Church
It begins with community. In the 1950s most urban Californians, including many of my school friends, seemed to be from other parts of the country. However, my family’s Presbyterian church didn’t fit that pattern. My mother’s parents had met and married in that church. My father’s family joined when he was eleven. We attended church there three times a week - the Sunday morning preaching service (communion once a quarter), the Sunday evening evangelistic service, and the mid-week potluck meal and prayer meeting. I felt included in all this and certain that community mattered. That of which I was most certain was the goodness and deep faith of the circle of family and friends which rooted me in a lifelong pursuit of knowing God through faith, practice, and service in Jesus’ name.
The faith began in Sunday School, where I learned to love Bible stories, even the hair-raising ones from the Old Testament. At age twelve, I was excited when came time to join the adults in church. I thought it would be wonderful. Instead, I found myself bored at forty-minute expository sermons and fifteen-minute pastoral prayers, hearing our pastor (whom I liked) drone on in a steady stream of words from the high central pulpit.
At this early time, I began to imagine the difference some other church building or liturgy could make. I wanted our worship to be better than this. Church community worked for me and created much of my desire for something more. The passion for the power of liturgy and good architecture began with an unsatisfied longing as I tried to imagine something I had not yet seen.
Throughout my adolescence, I daydreamed of a different kind of church, where my friends, my parents and grandparents and all their friends could do more together than just sing two hymns. I pictured us all standing or sitting in parallel center-facing rows. Seeing each others’ faces as we worshiped together, singing, praying and listening could anchor us in the moment. In my imagined church, I wanted to pray with my eyes open. I wanted to catch something in another’s face that would move us to experience God’s presence together. I wanted a more human, more engaging way to hear the stories I loved.
When I was fourteen, our new youth minister took the young people away for a weekend retreat. On Saturday morning, he gathered us all in the retreat center’s rustic dining hall. We found our places at round tables he had set with a single loaf of bread and a goblet of grape juice. He waited until we’d found places at the tables, and then, from the middle of the room, he read Paul’s account of the Last Supper in I Corinthians. When he read that Jesus broke the bread, he asked one of us at each table to take up the loaf, break a piece and pass the broken loaf to the next person. Then, as he read that Jesus blessed and shared the cup, we drank in turn from the goblet. The light in that dining room, the smell of bare wood planking, the feel and scent of the bread as I broke and passed it, its taste, the weight of the chalice, and the familiar but somehow changed scent of the grape have remained with me for forty years. Here was communion in Jesus’ presence as I had never experienced it before.
Back home at church, we still passed silent trays containing tiny cubes of Wonder Bread and clattering trays of shot glasses filled with grape juice. Having now tasted a more literal sharing of communion, I wanted it regularly and hoped to offer it to others.
That retreat created a new fascinating architectural problem for me. It was not exactly a dining hall I wanted for sharing communion, but I was not sure what it was. And how did it fit with the idea of people facing each other? I got as far as thinking of people sitting in rows, facing each other to hear the Bible, sing, pray, hear a different kind of sermon and then somehow gather them around tables for communion face to face. I resolved to make such a church someday, if I couldn’t find one.
I continued to imagine how we could free ourselves from the constraints of the church building I knew. I had a glimpse of how church community could hold and shape the church building to its life rather than living into the building’s definition of the community. My urgent desire to reform the building and the liturgy would eventually make me an Episcopal priest. Thirty years later, I see that my search for a new kind of sacred space and more shared action led me to new theology, new spirituality, and new practice. Over these thirty years, I have been discovering how liturgy can open people to God and create powerful ministering communities.
Today most Christian buildings shape our communities to a theology Jesus rejected. Christians who remember and want to live Jesus’ teaching and practice must ask if the Middle Ages or even the Reformation or the Vatican II reforms offer us spaces for worship that are adequate to authentic community and lively sacraments. Like it or not, the church building and furniture literally will shape the community’s ways of gathering and the ways people see and touch one another. Brick and mortar theology, our walls, our furniture, and our seating will define relationships, lines of communication, and all of the invisible dynamic aspects of community. Whether our church buildings appear loving, daring, inviting, or forbidding, each one holds church community and defines how it can act and move.
Of course, the church community can use words to define its gathering, but if we defend (or accept) the constraints of church buildings for sentimental, nostalgic or political reasons, or if we take our inheritance from the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival as “tradition,” we consent to profound and possibly ungodly limitations and constraints on what we do and who we will become. The building’s voice and the choices its design represents will shout down any teaching that contradicts it. As Louis Weil, professor of liturgics at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, puts it, “Don’t argue with the building, the building always wins.” What Weil means is that the logic of the building will shout down any theology that contradicts it. The only argument we can win is to build (or remake) a building to say what we actually believe.
As for the Episcopal Church, we haven’t argued with the building for quite some time. Over the last fifty years, some Episcopal churches have moved their altar tables a few feet out from the wall and then said that more serious renovation “will have to wait,” thereby giving the building the last word. Some have built or renewed their spaces on a pattern of theater-in-the-round, which is a kind of remaking of the building’s logic, but far more limited than it may first appear. Very few Episcopal communities have found the courage to reshape the walls and seating that contain them to make it possible for the people to move. Our inherited buildings continue to shout a medieval theology in which the congregation are spectators to the liturgy.
Worship spaces that contradict our intentions and theology inevitably re-shape flesh and blood to their own wooden or stony truth. We are in the presence of our peril and opportunity. Anglican Christians who consistently claim to know God in the Incarnation and in history strangely have been willing to cede killing power to our gathering spaces. Brick and mortar, stone, wood, plaster, plywood, steel and glass, all unyielding building materials can prevent us from seeing, moving, or touching each other.
Probably anyone working on a church building committee hopes to build a church that welcomes people in. It is likely, as well, that any good church building committee hopes to help create a gathering place that will serve the congregation’s actual theology and intentions well enough to offer us new life and holy power. But how? Large open doors and welcoming signs visible to passing strangers begin the work. But once inside, how do we enact God’s presence? Do we open our experience to God’s free movement among us? Or do we hold God at a distance? What is our particular theology and experience of community in Christ? How do community, grace and calling shape our daily work and mission? A congregation’s building project invites new imagining of how to live the Gospel. We can shape an architectural intention by looking at the teaching and practice of Jesus, and by telling the creation stories of our communities.
Jesus’ Story Teaches Us Our Mission; Can Jesus’ Practice Shape Our Sacraments?
The Christian church began with Jesus’ gathering together a core community of a rough dozen followers that he symbolically named, “the Twelve,” the new Israel. Israel’s prophets already had declared the identity and work of this new Israel. Four familiar passages sketch a sufficient reminder of their vision:
“You [God] prepare a Table before me in the presence of my enemies.” (Psalm 23:5)
“On this mountain the Lord YHWH will make a feast for all nations.” (Isaiah 25:6)
“What I desire is that you love justice and mercy and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” (Joel 2:28)
In these prophets’ visions, holy community shines with the power of God when it welcomes enemies, strangers, and outsiders with God’s own welcome. The prophets’ envisioned community could let go of a privileged place for the sake of compassion and sharing. Justice would spring from that community in the power of love and mercy.
Jesus did more than promise the prophets’ community was coming. Jesus made it happen. By his teaching, healing, feasting and enacting God’s justice, Jesus’ began creating this new community and invited his followers to share it. Religious authorities of his time took offense that he included strangers and unprepared sinners, not seeing that he feasted with them to inaugurate and enact God’s work of welcoming all, pouring the Spirit out on all flesh.
Jesus’ practiced reconciliation in the name of God, so his community feasts broke divisions. In his last meal before he was seized and tried, Jesus predicted his brutal death as a condemned outcast and commanded his disciples to continue the feasts they had kept, remembering his death so that his broken body and shed blood could reconcile all outsiders and outcasts. Then he completed his work by suffering and dying with the most despised on a cross outside the city walls. Most of his friends fled his death in terror for their own lives.
But then, when the threat seemed less, the grieving disciples came to his borrowed grave and found angels proclaiming his victory over death. Later, the frightened disciples gathered to break bread behind locked doors. Jesus himself appeared among them to lead their celebration. In the locked room (and on the dusty road to the village of Emmaus) they heard him interpret and manifest how they would continue his work.
The places of revelation and awe in this story are as mundane and shameful as a market place or a borrowed room in a simple house. Jesus’ disciples embraced both the ordinary and the shameful. As they continued to experience Jesus’ presence in their feasts, they elaborated his prophetic re-interpretation of his brutal and shameful death. They claimed boldly his shameful cross as a symbol of holiness and God’s work.
After Jesus’ resurrection, his followers welcomed both Gentile foreigners and eventually even killing enemies like Paul to feast with them. This community’s holy space (like Jesus’ holy space) was wherever the community gathered for the feast - in the countryside, the marketplace, or at the dining tables of Pharisees and sinners.
In Jerusalem, Jesus’ disciples continued to observe Temple ritual along with their public healing and preaching. But the Temple was not their center. Everyday homes, where they met for the feast, created a different kind of center. Soon they began modifying larger homes for liturgy and assembly. When they could, they began building public places of worship to better welcome strangers. As their places of worship developed, the post-resurrection community had so little impulse to isolate sacredness from ordinary life that their neighbors suspected they were atheists. Cosmopolitan religious consumers of the first-century Mediterranean world saw nothing in Christian sacred spaces to suggest the atmosphere of “Temple.”
Today, we must work to remember how those ancient church spaces broke free from the culturally pervasive patterns of temple, shrine, or sacred grove, because it was not long before the church returned to such patterns. Over its first millennium, due to a process of change in doctrine, discipline and politics, the church gradually shifted its architecture back to a primordial human pattern, with the untouchable, set-apart sacredness of sacrificial religion.
By the early Middle Ages, isolated holy space defined church architecture. Older church buildings were re-made to add barriers and increase distance between clergy and people. Distance and barriers limited ordinary Christians to watching in safe awe as the clergy offered a holy spectacle for their benefit. New buildings included distance and barriers all the more explicitly.
Everything in the church building—furniture, fences, and eventually screens and walls— expressed this isolation. What began as a change in teaching and emphasis eventually changed the liturgy, and then the architecture until this new architecture of sacral power and buffering distance locked Christian liturgy, community life, and theology into patterns that contradict Jesus’ teaching and practice.
As a result, we can choose to hear Weil’s warning of not to argue with the building as either a counsel of despair or a call to action. Can we once again reshape our buildings to speak the Gospel we preach and intend to live? This is the unfinished work of the liturgical reform begun in the last century.
In the mid-twentieth century, Christians of many different traditions tried to improve liturgical spaces without stopping to hear the full argument of the buildings they inherited. What they didn’t let themselves hear then echoes on in their renovations and in many new churches built since. Many “new” buildings still communicate a variant of an old pre-Christian (and less than Christian) message.
Should Our Churches Speak with the Archetypal Voice of Sacred Space?
To begin thinking clearly about how a building can serve a congregation, its liturgy and mission, we must consider the conventional messages of sacred spaces. In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, an important and widely regarded twentieth century architecture teacher, offers insightful and accurate observations of the familiar kinds of buildings in this culture and around the world.
What is a door and what happens on either side of an entrance space? What do walls keep in and what do they keep out? What is a window? Alexander invites us to look and watch to learn the answers. By considering what people actually do in the spaces they make for themselves, how they move in the spaces and use them, he listened for a pattern language that would teach us the purpose a space would declare for itself. Alexander pioneered a way of looking at buildings by seeing how people intuitively or purposefully structured spaces to support their actions in them. If we can see the meaning in the pattern, then we can use human choices and actions to design better and truer buildings.
In the chapter entitled, “Sacred Ground,” Alexander follows his analysis of homes and various kinds of public buildings by making a useful attempt to describe the universal pattern of sacred space. It is important to note that every building on the pattern of “sacred” Alexander describes contradicts Jesus’ practice and teaching of holiness and our presence to God.
Jesus, in his parables and by his prophetic actions in the Gospels, deliberately overturned an old, pervasive pattern of holiness to offer something quite new. Alexander’s observations make the theological importance of buildings that have not heeded that work quite clear. What Alexander describes is VERY pervasive. Most familiar buildings in Christian and other religious settings fit Alexander’s description. His observations offer us crucial data for critiquing any new work of our own.
Alexander begins the chapter with a rhetorical question that he answers immediately:
What is a church or temple? It is a place of worship, spirit, contemplation, of course. But above all, from a human point of view, it is a gateway. . . A person comes into the world through the church. He leaves it through the church. And, at each of the important thresholds of his life, he once again steps through the church.
Sacredness, for Alexander, focuses on human rituals marking developmental passages. He writes,
The rites that accompany birth, puberty, marriage, and death are fundamental to human growth. Unless these rites are given the emotional weight they need, it is impossible for a man or woman to pass thoroughly from one stage of life to another.
In all traditional societies, where these rites are treated with enormous power and respect, the rites, in one form or another, are supported by parts of the physical environment which have the character of gates. But of course, a gate, a gateway, by itself cannot create a rite. But it is also true that the rites cannot evolve in an environment which specifically ignores them or makes them trivial. A hospital is no place for a baptism; a funeral home makes it impossible to feel the meaning of a funeral.
Reading this as we remember that Jesus’ prophetic meal liturgy took barriers down, we must wonder how the sacred buildings and precincts Alexander asks us to consider could serve for communion. Ignoring or trivializing gates, barriers and boundaries is exactly what Jesus did. St. Paul drove the point home in speaking of Jesus’ crucifixion “outside the gates,” beyond the confines and definition of the Holy City of Jerusalem. Jesus died outside the conventional boundaries of holiness where he had already gone in his table fellowship with unprepared sinners. Therefore, Alexander’s definition of “sacred” aptly describes the conventional religious thinking that Jesus overturned. Alexander writes,
In all cultures it seems that whatever it is that is holy will only be felt as holy, if it is hard to reach, if it requires layers of access, waiting, levels of approach, a gradual unpeeling, gradual revelation, passage through a series of gates.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day faulted him for allowing his disciples to feast with ritually unwashed hands, for welcoming sinners who had not repented or done any cleansing ritual, and even for allowing people who were unclean sinners to touch him. Alexander reminds us that the logic of those religious leaders appears almost everywhere,
There are many examples: the Inner City of Peking; the fact that anyone who has audience with the Pope must wait in each of seven waiting rooms; the Aztec sacrifices that took place on stepped pyramids, each step closer to the sacrifice; the Ise shrine, the most famous shrine in Japan, is a nest of precincts, each one inside the other.
Certainly, these are images of reverence in the sense of awe, dread, and fear. From Asia, the Americas, and Europe, Alexander offers us a sacred imperial palace (home of an emperor-god), a sacralized center of church power, a sacrificial temple, and a sacred precinct one visits on pilgrim journey. Alexander’s broad sampling from cultures and moments in history could easily include Pilate’s Palace and the Jerusalem Temple, the government and religious buildings of which Jesus knew. Jesus’ teaching did not commend such places. On the contrary, Jesus’ community-making created openly accessible, explicitly non-sacrificial, non-hierarchical gatherings and said that in these gatherings God was wholly present to the people.
The Temple Jesus knew was ordered like any Mediterranean temple. Just as Alexander describes and predicts, it was an inaccessible sacred space surrounded by protective (progressively less charged and more accessible) courtyards. Thinking from the outside in, the Court of the Gentiles, the Court of Women, etc., each allowed access to fewer people until the innermost holy place was entered only once a year and by only one person.
In the Temple, the faithful could glimpse the Holy of Holies down the long axis of gates from courtyard to courtyard. At the end of the axis, the Temple’s “veil” (probably a net-like curtain of rope) offered a muted glimpse of the space within. The Temple’s sanctuary differed from those in Egyptian temples because it was empty of any image of God. Through the cloud of incense and smoke offerings, and beyond the veil, there was no idol, only an empty space to image the image-less God of Israel. In this important respect, the Jerusalem Temple did critique and go beyond the adjacent culture’s theology and worship. Even so, its worship spoke the recognizable architectural language of controlled access and enforced distance.
To approach the sacred Holy of Holies, while being held back, shaped an experience of awe and controlled transgression. To come close to something that should not be touched, as Alexander argues, bring worshipers within safe distance of the ultimate forbidding sacred space where they knew they do not belong. Distance and barrier create a feeling of approach to what was powerful, attractive, dangerous, and forbidden. This shapes an experience people call “holy.”
In the Gospel accounts, Jesus visited the Temple to disrupt the sacred commerce that was required to maintain ritual purity for sacrifice. We speak of this in the orderly language of “Jesus cleansing the Temple.” Yet, the language and impulse of “cleansing” with its precise, manageable distinction of “clean” and “unclean” is exactly what Jesus overturned with the moneychangers tables and animal cages. After making the day’s sacrifices impossible, Jesus claimed his Father’s house should be “a house of prayer for all people.” Words that could equally be said of the synagogue that all could attend, or of any of his gatherings of the Twelve.
Two other passages in the Gospels teach the un-making of the then universal architecture of holiness. One is Jesus’ prediction that not one stone would be left on another of the Temple, and the other, the prophetic sign reported at his death of the rending of the Temple veil from top to bottom.
The torn veil of the Temple, like Jesus’ teaching and meal practice, and the whole flow of the Gospel narratives from all four Evangelists, directly challenges this once universal worship pattern. Because of Jesus’ life and death, Christian holiness will mean something quite different and require a different architectural language.
Notice when Alexander claims he is observing a pattern that is genuinely invariant from culture to culture, he explicitly includes Christian churches in the pattern:
Even in an ordinary Christian church, you pass first through the churchyard, then through the nave, then on special occasions, beyond the altar rail into the chancel and only the priest himself is able to go into the tabernacle. The holy bread is sheltered by five layers of ever more difficult approach.
Alexander accurately describes a thousand years or more of Christian church building and liturgy. By the early Middle Ages, the fearful power of human religious sensibilities had repaired and reinstated the Temple pattern of holiness that Jesus defied.
Episcopal church buildings, with Gothic-revival floor plans, conform perfectly to Alexander’s description. Gathering to mark passages through critical points of life echoes the experience of a nominal Episcopalian invited to serve as a godparent at a baptism, a best man at a wedding, or a pallbearer at a funeral. Whether Alexander is a nominal Episcopalian or not, he sees church buildings like a sophisticated, appreciative tourist making an architectural tour of European cathedrals. Both sets of experiences (liturgical marking of life passages and aesthetic pilgrimages) are like visiting a shrine (or “sacred ground") protected by a shaman or temple priest. The places he describe do not welcome fully-shared actions of a holy community shaped from holy participants.
Jesus’ practice implied an architecture of ongoing community with frequent feasts. His Gospel contradicts the architectural message of our forbidding church buildings and demands that we open our spirits to the transforming power of the Spirit, to envision something far different. Believing that public Christian communities must welcome strangers and even enemies (a theological perspective), we must work for every opportunity to create truly public space for authentically Christian communities to worship. This requires creative architectural work of a very high order.
So what sort of public places should we build for Christian assembly? The first-century marketplace fostered chaotic inter-active community—a place where children would pipe and sing, prompting people to dance or weep. The resurrection meeting places were painfully ordinary. The stories of meeting Jesus in them live by words, touch, and food.
At this point, we can begin with two architectural principles that will be consistent with Jesus’ prophetic transformation of community:
1) What the Christian community does when it gathers creates and contains its holy space, and,
2) Architectural spaces for Christian community will support welcoming and belonging, and giving and receiving of grace-filled gifts.
Digging in Ancient Christian Tradition to Uncover New Possibilities for Community and Church Architecture
Louis Bouyer’s book, Liturgy and Architecture, offers a radically different picture of early Christian sacred spaces that is based on Jewish synagogue patterns. Bouyer was a French Roman Catholic priest, a former Lutheran, and a scholar of early Christian liturgy, spirituality, and church buildings.
Already we have observed that, through the Middle Ages, changes in church buildings served and created a more clericalized understanding of church community, as clergy ceased to be the people’s leaders and became institutional professionals doing the church’s work for a body of spectators. Bouyer chronicles the millennium that relentlessly imposed more conventionally sacral patterns on places of worship to make them into those Alexander describes.
Bouyer helps us see that the Reformation (including the Anglican Reformation) attempted to bridge the medieval distance between people and community with text, but left the church buildings to speak their other language.
As an example, we Anglicans can observe that Christopher Wren’s preaching halls, built after the Great Fire of London in the seventeenth century, show how profoundly the Reformation assented to clericalist pictures of liturgy and church buildings. Though Wren completely remade the pattern of church interiors, what he offered was a new shape for separating clergy authority. In these spaces, the ordained scholar and orator was raised high in his huge central pulpit. The word that was intended to bridge had become a sign of division between the authority of the preacher/scholar and the passive congregation/audience/class. Most Protestant church buildings in America are descendants of Wren’s seventeenth-century preaching classrooms.
In his book, Bouyer offers two powerful resources for consideration—first, his analysis of Syrian and Roman churches and Syrian synagogues from the fifth century and before, and second, his original suggestions for contemporary floor plans. He begins by observing how similar churches and synagogues were in that period. (Remember that both “synagogue” and “ecclesia” are names, not for buildings, but for the kind of gatherings that happened in them. “Synagogue” literally means “coming-together,” and “ecclesia” means “being-called-out.") In these earliest floor plans it is easy to imagine how the communities came together and experienced in their worship and their movement through the liturgy who they are called out to serve. These are buildings defined not by a sacralized event, but by the gathering and shaping of a fluid community of people.
Reflecting on these floor plans, Bouyer asserts that, “. . .to have a satisfactory celebration of the Eucharist it is essential that the congregation be able to group in different ways and more freely from one [way] to the other.” “Satisfactory” and “essential” are strong words, not typical of Bouyer’s voice. With them, he intends to offer us a strong challenge.
Moving the altar table out from the wall or even creating a centralized, theater-in-the-round space does not provide for the people to move. Moving the altar table was perhaps the least important change of the twentieth century, least important because it literally left the people unmoved. People participate by doing things. The most radical reform in the previous generation was sharing the Peace and going forward to receive communion on a weekly basis. According to Bouyer, bringing out the altar table so the people could “see” the celebration only affirmed that old pattern rather than overturning it. He writes,
“ . . .we must not confuse participating in the celebration with looking at it. The practice of looking curiously at the eucharistic elements themselves, especially at the time of the consecration, is a practice completely unknown to Christian antiquity. . .the concentration on seeing what the officiants do, far from having ever accompanied a real participation of all in the liturgy, has appeared as a compensation for the lack of this participation, and is psychologically more or less exclusive of it. . . .either you look at somebody doing something for you, instead of you, or you do it with him. You can’t do both at the same time.”
Typical post-Vatican II reforms of church space ignore Bouyer’s wisdom and simply shift from arranging the congregation like a conventional theater audience with a proscenium arch to either moving “the action” out on to a thrust stage (moving the altar table forward) or putting it in the center of the audience (liturgy-in-the-round). In other words, the congregation’s seats are re-arranged, but they remain safely in them and to that extent, continue acting as an audience.
I recommend Bouyer’s work to anyone planning a new church building or wanting to re-make an old one to better serve the liturgy of a gathered Christian community. The book is out of print, but it is well worth tracking down in a theological library or finding in a used book search. My sketch of Bouyer’s book will not do the work itself justice. However, I gladly offer something besides a full summary here: a synopsis of our story using his floor plans in old and new buildings, and our experience of making liturgies without audience.
Thirty Years, Three Congregations, and Five Spaces with Room to Move
1970-1976, the Episcopal Church at Yale University
In 1970, Chaplain Rick Fabian began planning for the festal (Saints’ Day) liturgies at the Episcopal Church at Yale University, by synthesizing the following two floor plans from Bouyer.
[Illustration, Bouyer proposed floor plan, p. 113 in Liturgy and Architecture]
and
[Illustration, other Bouyer drawing - early Roman adaptation of Basilica]
The existing space within which he was working was Dwight Chapel, a long, high tunnel of a Gothic revival building with no fixed furniture. Festival liturgies in 1970 was followed, in 1971, with a daily-sung Lamplighting, Evening Office and Eucharist that grew to an average attendance of twenty. Both the smaller and larger versions of these liturgies used this floor plan:
[Illustration, Dwight Chapel Typical Floor Plan]
Notice that in turning the arrangement of Dwight Chapel completely around from its Gothic alignment, by turning away from where the old high altar would have been, to face the entrance doors, we returned the space to the ancient Roman basilica pattern.
In 1972, I joined Rick as his associate chaplain. By 1976, we used various adaptations of this arrangement for a variety of liturgies, that included both of our ordinations to the priesthood, over four years of daily and Sunday Eucharists (six days a week), Festival Eucharists for a variety of saints’ days, an Easter Vigil with a congregation of a couple of hundred, baptisms (with the font in the middle of the assembly’s seating), and several nuptial Eucharists, including my own.
We adhered consistently to Bouyer’s principle that the liturgy and the whole assembly would move in a single direction, and the assembly together would orient in a single direction from the opening blessing until the dismissal.
The doors stood open until we gathered at the altar table. The open doors worked like a magnet, drawing people in to join us. Presider and deacon faced the visitors directly down the long axis. The whole congregation could see each other’s faces, by virtue of the choir seating, as we offered prayers toward the altar table and later as we gathered at the altar table near the door.
From the congregation’s perspective, the open doors gave a vision of the world beyond our altar table in those visitors who entered, the changing amount of visible sunlight, and the daily seasonal changes on the Old Campus (a huge enclosed quadrangle with grass, mature trees, and a crisscrossing network of heavily trafficked pedestrian walks).
The congregation moving together, the ease of moving to exchange the Peace (which we offered at the altar table just before the Eucharistic prayer), our sense of very immediate presence to the altar table for the Eucharistic prayer, and an intimacy in administering communion were the obvious benefits of this arrangement.
A less obvious benefit was the singing. At all these services, we discovered the evangelical and community-building power of singing together, when we could see one another’s faces and when the many voices converged toward us. Standing in the line of our neighbor’s voice, as well as seeing and hearing one another as we sang created some marvelous experiences. The congregation found the courage to stumble through new things. By sometimes sounding very good, we were encouraged to bear with those times we did not. We began to discover that singing to the Lord a new song could be joyful.
The prayers of the people lived as I had never experienced them before. We created a litany form in which everyone could offer individual prayers out loud for the whole congregation’s response. We saw and felt the grace expressed on each other’s face as we prayed.
1976-1980, St. David’s Episcopal Church in Caldwell, Idaho
When I left Yale to serve as rector of St. David’s Church in Caldwell, Idaho, I continued working with this basic arrangement of worship space, though not at the main Sunday service. In a highly conflicted parish that had never seen anything but the 1928 Prayer Book, Sunday’s work was simply to introduce Rite I and Rite II of the new 1976 Proposed Prayer Book. But with a handsome altar table a parishioner built us and a large mounted print of St. Francis’s San Damiano crucifix, I created a workable chapel in an alcove of the parish hall. It had been a space used for storing old chairs and other cast off things behind a curtain. I began offering a new mid-week Eucharist in this simple chapel using the following floor plan:
[Illustration, St. David’s floor plan]
A mixed core of parishioners (including both young adults and retired, older people) joyfully supported a liturgy there that included: unaccompanied singing, shared silences, shared reflection on scripture, free prayers, gathering together at the altar table, and simple congregational dance.
I invited the congregation to begin this mid-week liturgy as a supportive community for their pastor, asking anyone who was willing to try doing some things differently to come worship in ways that I personally found nourishing. With a Sunday congregation of only around sixty-five, this mid-week liturgy steadily drew an average of twelve to fifteen people. Our sharing reflection on scripture was lively and personal. People exchanged the Peace with untypical ease. They were surprised at how well they learned to sing together. Regular participants brought roasts and homemade pies to the weekly potluck that followed.
1978-1995, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, San Francisco: in Trinity Church Chapel
On St. Gregory’s day, March 9, 1978, the first liturgy of St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church was held in a borrowed chapel of Trinity Church. I was still rector of St. David’s at the time. At Rick Fabian’s invitation, who was now the Rector of St. Gregory’s, I flew down to preside at that first liturgy. Rick served as deacon (allowing him to run the liturgy) and preached. Shortly after that beginning, Trinity Church leased that chapel space to St. Gregory’s and allowed the new congregation to remove the pews, altar, altar rail and other furniture, and to level the old sanctuary floor. In that 1892 domed Romanesque revival space, St. Gregory’s arranged itself according to the following floor plan:
[Illustration, St. Gregory’s floor plan]
In 1980, when I arrived to serve in a shared pastorate with Rick, I built an altar table for the parish that looked like the following drawing:
[Illustration, Altar Table drawing]
In the floor plan, the Trinity Chapel entrance doors appear more similar to those of Dwight Chapel at Yale than they actually were. Dwight Chapel is the only one of these five floor plans where we actually had the great doors placed just as Bouyer envisioned. The doors at Trinity chapel looked out on a dark, windowless narthex—a problematic space for an entrance. Another concern with the entrance was voiced by people who found it difficult to cross the space from doors to seating coming late. We had not heard that experience at Dwight Chapel because the columns offered aisles and a less obtrusive path toward the gathering space once someone stepped through the great doors.
In all these various arrangements, a single central axis oriented all our prayers from the beginning of the liturgy toward the altar table. We sat so as to see each others’ faces when we prayed. Consistently, we had one distinctly ordered space and communal way of being for the ministry of the Word and prayers, and then we moved as a group into another distinctly ordered space and communal way of being for the Peace, Eucharistic prayer and communion. The simple expedient of two congregational spaces in the same liturgy literally moved the whole congregation together in a progress through the liturgy.
We are creating a liturgy of action, touch, and affect. From congregational movement and the reactions it made possible, we could reach beneath words and thinking to the affectionate, challenging presence of people, the real ground of changes to our hearts, minds and actions.
Is this doubling of spaces economical? In Dwight Chapel, we used one common room for meetings, suppers, and other gatherings. At St. David’s, the chapel was simply part of the parish hall, and when St. Gregory’s was in Trinity Chapel, everything took place in the one sacred space because we had no other. Starting from necessity, we began to discover the theological power of multi-use space, where the environment of worship defines the space. Functions that traditionally had distinct spaces, such as ‘parish hall’ or ‘classroom,’ now take place in the worship space (rather than worship adapting itself to a part of the parish hall). Parish suppers, coffee hour, workshops, classes, parish meetings, committee meetings, an anniversary dance, our Mardi Gras talent show, and concerts all gained a depth of joy and showed their own different dimensions of holiness from taking place right in our regular worship space, often right around the altar table.
What other things have we learned from these various congregations and spaces before we built the new St. Gregory’s Church in 1995? What was the shape of Christian formation and ministry in these various settings? How had our vision of community and mission grown in thirty continuous years of using such arrangements?
We conceived of the Episcopal Church at Yale as a missionary enterprise. Our work was gathering undergraduates (including several with no previous experience of Christian faith) and helping them try on a community that prayed together every day with psalmody, shared silence, prayer and sung Eucharist. The open door and word of mouth about our liturgy drew them in. Thirty years later, those people we welcomed, baptized and formed in that chaplaincy are shaping their own and others’ community lives around just such shared prayer. Some now are clergy, church musicians, and of course, active lay leaders and teachers.
At St. David’s, I created the mid-week liturgy and the parish hall chapel as my personal place of possibility. Historical circumstances (a new rector and bishop who required immediate change to the 1979 Prayer Book) had pushed our Sunday liturgy into painful conflict. I needed a community of prayer and a dependable setting where people could gather, experience and share understandings. I needed a place that would invite the rest of the congregation past their grief and fears, and to enter into the deeper logic of Prayer Book change.
Some people, whose only previous experience was the 1928 Prayer Book, tried this alternative setting and learned the difference a more participatory, richer, shared prayer could make. They found they were learning it not just in new texts, but in shared actions, movements, and stillness.
In that conservative congregation, we struggled each Sunday to understand one another through the abrupt discovery that a decade of massive liturgical change in the Episcopal Church was completely outside that congregation’s experience. The mid-week service, with its simple unaccompanied singing, silences, conversational preaching and prayer, Eucharist gathered around the altar table, and congregational dance, became an intergenerational gathering of joy, comfort, nurture and challenge for some of the young people in the parish, as well as some of the loneliest older people. I had not anticipated such a diverse group were hungry for community and ready to let the liturgy touch them. Literally, it is touch and all the other non-verbal interactions that give liturgy its deepest power to change us.
In the earliest days of St. Gregory’s, our gathering served primarily to build Christian community around a vision of what might be possible liturgically and organizationally. We developed a steady stream of visitors who had either left other denominations or dropped out of church for a while. By Yellow Pages advertising, our banner on the street, and word of mouth, people came to us looking for something they had felt or imagined possible in worship. Many nursed old disappointments, but also carried great hope. Many brought stories, like mine, from their youth - having found both promise and disappointment in the communities from which they came. Our weekly liturgy shaped their hope into a kind of consensus for our future and enlisted people in the work of making their dreams happen.
As we shaped this dream, we began making discoveries around creativity. From the beginning using material we developed at Yale, St. Gregory’s offered a lively musical tradition that included new texts to traditional Russian chant, plainsong, Renaissance tunes, and Early American singing traditions. We also introduced new compositions into the liturgy, which gradually invited more original work. By singing new compositions, we attracted more experienced composers and encouraged first-time ones. We asked our part-time music director to review new work and coach the composers until their new works were ready for the congregation.
Through other creative programs that included, a monthly writers’ group and annual writers’ weekend, a congregational journal, a gathering of painters and visual artists, intergenerational dramas in the liturgy, and adding these new ingredients a few at a time, we created a rich mix of media and a spirituality that honored original creative work as a normal part of ordinary human life. Enthusiasm for new creative work and sharp, passionate questions of faith became universal in our congregation. We did not draw people who considered themselves liturgical experts (although we were known for doing an unusually participatory, high-quality liturgy). In fact, most people said what touched them most deeply at St. Gregory’s was the preaching, sermon sharing, and free prayers, followed by the singing and our welcoming them to sing.
1995-present, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, San Francisco: Our New Church Building
In 1995, a long seventeen and a half years after St. Gregory’s first liturgy, we moved into the new church building we had designed with our architect, John Goldman. The following year, we won an American Institute of Architects Best Religious Building of the Year award. The floor plan for the new church building was adapted from Bouyer’s floor plan.
[Illustration, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church present floor plan]
The entrance door is located on the street side of the altar table area. The shape of our city lot requires the long axis of the building be parallel to the street. In an earlier draft of the design, the entrance was through a garden (approximately where the doors open on the baptismal font). We unconsciously imitated the garden courtyard entrance we had at Trinity Chapel, which was pretty and we were attached to it. However in doing so, we unintentionally hid the new front doors, falling into the exact kind of doors within doors, staged entrance that Alexander prescribed in his book. We did this, even though for seventeen years people told us they had a hard time finding the entrance to Trinity Chapel. Reviewing the first draft of plans with the Rev. Charles Fulton of the Episcopal Church Building Fund, he pointed out our hidden doors to us quite forcefully by saying, “You’ve done what Episcopal Churches do over and over again - hiding the doors from visitors!” So we made our entrance visible from the street and asked our architect to make an obvious and powerfully inviting set of doors and porch.
After seventeen years experience of multi-use worship space at Trinity Chapel, we knew the area around the altar table would double as our parish hall. We put an adequate kitchen directly adjacent to the altar table space, so we could use the space for Eucharist at Tables, in the style of Didache or cater a wedding reception or any of the other functions that tied Eucharistic fellowship to other feasting tables in the church’s life.
The small meditation chapel, diagonally opposite the kitchen, reflects another lesson learned from multi-use space. Since coffee hour is a continuation of our Eucharistic liturgy, coffee and refreshments are brought directly to the altar table immediately following communion. Those who want a few moments of quiet prayer after communion requested we make a separate place. The meditation chapel has no altar table. Also, it is used for mid-week Zen/Centering Prayer sittings and a small weekly Taize service of prayers around the cross (during the 10 a.m. liturgy, it becomes a Sunday School class).
From our experience at Trinity Chapel, we divided the sacristy into two separate areas - a vessel and food preparation area that is attached to the kitchen and a vesting area for clergy, musicians, and lay servers. This division serves us well, with the teams of people in both areas functioning differently both before and after a service.
What Did We Discover in this New Space?
We grew! After seventeen years of preparing to welcome people and having inviting doors, it paid off. The old space had become too full to allow us to grow. Now visitors came and stayed. Within the first month in our new space, the congregation doubled. In the following three years, it doubled again. We began welcoming large numbers of people with no previous church experience, including a number of adult baptisms. New people said that the powerful building, and its welcoming doors that revealed an unobstructed, beckoning altar table within, drew them in.
Our concert and special event use soared as we cultivated relationships with musical performance groups. In the design of the building, we paid careful attention to acoustics and ways to re-arrange the space for a variety of performances. Some of our most active and generous members first walked through the doors of St. Gregory’s to attend a concert. Our contracts with the musical groups require that the church’s information table (listing classes, liturgies, and programs) be available during concerts.
We created a large body of new visual art for the building. This is a story in itself as we moved from being a collecting church to a creating church. Much of the work can be seen on our website. The emotionally affective power of hand-made work speaks to peoples’ courage to create art. But it also encourages creative, courageous action for the love of God and other people. Good Christian art moves people to see and act in new possibilities in their lives.
Our classes for adults and children grew even faster than our Sunday liturgy. Five to six times the number of original participants now attend, including a number of adult courses lead by the laity.
Most recently, we see a great blossoming of energy and projects to serve the poor. How did this happen? What moves a church that has invested energy and resources in creativity, music, art, and dance, to take on large-scale service work? Is that a drastic change of direction? For us, it is not.
A few members, who care deeply about justice and compassionate service, looked for ways to draw St. Gregory’s people into this work. They moved in a way consistent with our community life and the patterns of our church building. They created a path of participation and a desire to create.
The biggest step forward came when one lay leader, seeing that St. Gregory’s was enthusiastic about artistic and creative projects, heard the whimsical dream of the founders of St. Martin de Porres, our local Catholic Worker House of Hospitality. He enrolled the congregation in making six hundred, hand-dyed Easter eggs for Martin’s meal guests on Easter day. From that beginning, a core group of volunteers began serving at Martin’s each month.
On another occasion, we tried to reach out to our neighboring public middle school with an arts program for needy kids. However, the school rebuffed our initial overture, fearful that “separation of church and state” issues would make our offer illegal. Later, they came back, asking us to sponsor school uniforms for kids who could not afford them, and we easily raised enough money for the requested uniforms. When another parishioner saw the desperate need of the school’s library, she asked the librarian to make a wish-list of books, thus collaborating with the librarian’s imagination and creativity. For the past four years, our congregation easily raised two to three thousand dollars a year to complete the librarian’s acquisitions wish list.
Another parishioner, who is a Vietnam veteran and suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, touched people’s imaginations and desires with his project for reconciliation in Laos, the country he once helped bomb. We raised money to ship a huge collection of medical supplies to that country, along with our parishioner to deliver the supplies to working networks for village health care that he and a Laotian physician helped create and train.
Recently, a newly-baptized member, recalling her deep feelings when first welcomed to share at the altar table, longed to share a similar blessing with the hungry poor. She experienced the grace of physical and spiritual food being freely given, and wanted to create that experience of sharing for hungry families, by keeping the altar table at the center, and re-creating the pattern of sustenance and unexpected respect. Feeling the immediacy of the altar table’s presence among us - without rails or other barriers to keep us back, her vision was to offer hungry people their week’s groceries from our altar table. That vision grew quickly into a weekly food pantry, located in our altar table space that gives two large bags of free groceries to the poor every Friday and has enrolled a hundred volunteers. Each week our congregation of neighbors and friends, who need groceries, is as big as our combined Sunday liturgical gatherings. Some who first came to us for groceries, now are attending liturgy and became members.
The new marvel of the food pantry, feeding two hundred-fifty hungry people each week with free groceries from the altar table, brings us back to Bouyer. The church building where the whole assembly can “be gathered around the altar, nothing separating from the sacred meal,” in turn shapes a growing community’s Eucharistically-inspired mission. When the veil of the Temple is rent, when the walls come down, truly no one remains separated from the sacred meal.
We have many, many more stories of how profoundly ordinary lives are transformed by closeness to the holy altar table, where people can approach and gather round without barriers. These are stories of people who learn each week to participate freely in liturgy with their voices, their bodies, and their movement, and learn to act in community and from community in all the ways our Eucharist tells us God acts toward humankind.
Subscribe
Sign up to receive information about upcoming All Saints Company events, or link to us on Facebook.