Sacred Architecture

 I'm a fool for sacred architecture, as so much of this blog attests.  I love the diversity of it, the unique psychology of each sacred place, the wide array of feelings that the different churches, and synagogues, and mosques, and shrines arouse in the visitor's spirit.  I like the stark elegance of early American Protestant meetinghouses.  I like the otherworldly loftiness of Roman and especially Eastern Orthodox basilicas.  I like the intricate patterns of Islamic art, and the scroll-like design of Jewish temples.  The sacred places of Theravada Buddhism, in Southeast Asia, are spectacular, but I prefer the simpler Buddhist architecture of Japan.  Religion is a human product that aspires beyond the realm of the mundane, and for that I respect it.  

When I was young, I found all of this man-made beauty very convincing, and I lived in a book-induced world where the church was still an acceptable career option for a guy who liked poetry, and atmosphere, and ancient lore, and lofty ideals.  I realized that the clergyperson was always a minor character in any book or movie.  At best, he's the distinguished old fellow in medieval attire at the wedding or the funeral.  He's predictable in every way.  But his role was linked to these sacred buildings, which I found so hopeful and compelling.  

I especially like it when a sacred building expresses in architecture the philosophies and values of the community that worships there.  All of it is conditioned by a particular culture.  Of course, not all religious edifices are created equal; some congregations are too poor or uneducated to have artistic aspirations.  But here in Southwestern Pennsylvania, a rich past has endowed us with an abundance of sacred places whose very space communicates the ethos of its faith tradition.  Beauty is commonplace here.

This is Calvary Episcopal Church in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  Its space speaks of mystery, and majesty, and a certain rootedness in history.  Of course, some might argue that it lays claim to the Middle Ages, an era in history that no American church has any right to call its own.  But that is part of its psychology: It tries to evoke a sense of the eternal by claiming a connectedness to things other than its own time and place.  Say what you will about its Anglophilic pretensions; it remains a beautiful place.  A part of its loveliness is the fact that its psychology is definitely not democratic.  It may even reflect the hierarchical values and exclusivity of the neighborhood around it.  There is a rood screen to separate the holiest area--around the altar--from the congregation.  There is a lofty pulpit, lifting the clergyperson above the laity.  The psychology of the place seems to echo the ancient belief in a "Chain of Being," in which the angels are closest to God, then the king, then the clergy, then the nobles, and finally the commoners...just above the animals.  This church's many shadows intimate that the Divinity is not entirely knowable, which of course is true...but it is only one truth among many.  When the obese night guard saw me on his monitor camera, he came to chase me away, looking huffy, and harried, and breathing as if he'd just run a marathon.

"Zombie Land," Lawrence County

 I hate all things zombie.  But long before zombies swept the nation, a spooky little corner of Lawrence County has been known to locals as "Zombie Land."  And since the infamous two-mile stretch of unholy ground is so close to the convent where I'm retreating, I struck off on a drizzly November day to see if it really is as scary as legend purports.  The original so-called zombies (also known as "the bridge people") were apparently a hapless band of physically deformed adults who shared a group home in the wooded valley of the Mahoning River, just outside the depressingly dumpy village of Hillsville.  There was also supposedly a witch's house here, which has since burned down.  The body of at least one murder victim has been discovered here, though that was not a supernatural horror but a factual one; the killers were all three apprehended.

 Going north out of Hillsville on Churchill Road, where it crosses over US 224, the former St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church stands at the top of a long descent into the valley of the Mahoning River.  This is the entrance to Zombie Land.  There's a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and it's said that if her arms are spread open, then it's safe to enter Zombie Land.  But if her hands are clasped in prayer, then she is fighting the demonic powers of the place, and it is not safe to enter.  Of course, her hands are always folded.

 The congregation of St. Lawrence Church simply outgrew its building and constructed a bigger one closer to the village.  The old church has been converted into apartments, but it doesn't seem that anyone lives there.  It would be a strange place to live--surrounded by a cemetery, with stained glass windows in your kitchen and bathroom, a legendary statue in your yard, and on the edge of the notorious Zombie Land.

According to all that I've read about the place--and there is a lot of written material out there--the road used to be gravel.  The trees used to encroach more.  And there were fewer houses back in the days when Zombie Land began to earn its evil reputation.  At the bottom of the valley, Churchill Road crosses the river and comes to a T on the other side of the bridge.  Turn to the right and take the road that follows the river.  This area might technically still be Zombie Land--I don't know--but it's way spookier than the Churchill Road portion.

But, hell, everything feels spooky in a borderlands November, and I think it's always November here.

Sisters of the Humility of Mary, Motherhouse

 Villa Maria is in the sad borderlands just east of the Ohio state line.  The postindustrial city of Youngstown, Ohio, looms just a few miles to the west.  (Postindustrial?  Hell, more like post-apocalyptic.)  All around are the grayish Novemberlands of neglected farms and old industrial tracts.  The Mahoning and Shenango valleys are a spooky sort of place.  But Villa Maria is lovely.  

Notice the democratic psychology of the main chapel: altar and pulpit are on the same level as the people's chairs; seats are in a circle; there is no chancel, no choir, no rood screen.  The best thing about this chapel is the marble fountain of sweetly trickling holy water at the entrance.  It sounds like a meadow brook.  I didn't see a baptismal font in this place, but--immaculate conceptions excepted--why would they need one?

 The environs are gritty and haunted, but the little enclave of Villa Maria sits pretty and serene in the shadowy countryside.  Villa Maria is the Motherhouse of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, a small order of nuns that is active mostly in a few American states and Haiti.

 These nuns have kept up pretty well with the times.  They closed the girls' school back in the late '80s and made it into a center for personal retreats, group retreats, and conferences.  They've got chapels, and shrines, and a meditational labyrinth.  There's also an indoor swimming pool, a library, and a pretty good cafeteria.  It's a peaceful place that still has the feel of a small private college: broad lawns, towering shade trees, a reflective pond.

 Somehow my liberal Protestant imagination still ascribes to Roman Catholicism a lofty sort of grandeur that, in all fairness, is more Anglican than Roman.  After all these years of living in Pittsburgh, a town bedecked in the cheap trinkets of Italian and Polish Catholicism, I somehow continue to be surprised by Catholic kitsch.  Poorly made statues, wilted flowers on dusty shrines, schmaltzy sweet prayers showcasing theological ideas so esoteric that they surely don't tug at the hearts of anyone except the person who wrote them.  

 The framed prayer next to the Mary statue (fourth photo) says, "Most holy Virgin, I believe and confess your holy and immaculate conception, pure and without stain.  Most pure Virgin, by your virginal purity, your glorious quality of Mother of God, obtain for me of your divine Son humility, charity, purity of heart, mind and body, the gift of prayer, a holy life, and a happy death.  Amen."  

I understand that it's a prayer for nuns, not for ordinary laypeople (if I could be called a layperson).  And I agree that humility, charity, and the gift of prayer are all truly beautiful things.  But I don't like the prayer's implications about sex and purity (much less about natural law).  It makes human procreation seem so dirty, like a "stain" on a person's soul.  It's outlandish enough to say that Jesus was born of a virgin; why does Mary have to be born of one, too?  Is it true that the Roman Church hates sexuality--which is surely one of Life's great joys and gifts?  Also, it sounds like the prayer was translated a little stiltedly from the Latin.  It reminds me of the uncomfortable English that a long-ago friend read on her own paperwork when she was kicked out of a nunnery: "Insufficient Docility."  

But this is a wonderful place.  The sisters are sweet and very welcoming.  They've opened their Motherhouse to me and the others at our retreat.  And these ladies are very definitely peace-and-justice allies in the culture wars against right wing wackjobs of our times.  

Eternity

          Just what is eternity? We tend to think of eternity as the accumulation of all the forgotten years of eons past, but it's not.  Eternity stands beyond our years, before them and after them. It's everything outside my season of days in this body.  Every once in a great while you might touch eternity, become aware of it. In rare moments, eternity breaks into your span of time—when the cello hits a certain note that reminds you of something you spend most of your busy  life forgetting, a thing that cannot be put into words; when for a split second, something as mundane as a child's laughter, or a scene of great beauty, brings you an instant of clarity that is gone as quickly as it came; when in moments of deepest passion, or conviction, or love you feel yourself better and wiser than you are—on those rare occasions, you hear an echo of eternity, your distant home, which exists outside of time.  

          In this world, we, all of us, rush from the darkness of not-yet toward the darkness of no-more. We sense our own transience in the changing of the seasons, in sad goodbyes, in the aging of our own reflections in the mirror. And yet, every now and again we know within ourselves that we will not always be enslaved to the tyrant, time. Eternity is reminding us that in her calm and endless embrace, we remain her children before and after time. I do not say that there is an afterlife, as such.  But perhaps, as physicists are beginning to say, all time exists simultaneously, and to have lived once is to live forever.  Perhaps, beyond our season of numbered days, with their troubles and joys, with their woes and their satisfactions, perhaps eternity goes quietly about her business of remembering who we are.

"My November Guest"

          I'm a dork, a die-hard fan of Biber--that's Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, not to be confused with Justin Bieber--and I jam out to his Mystery Sonatas for hours.  It's a kind of wallowing.  In my supreme dorkiness, I've also been jamming out lately to Robert Frost, that melancholy poet of autumn.  Most people know him for his three most famous poems, but his lesser-known stuff is good, too. There's a note of sadness that runs through it all.  He finds beauty and meaning in the declining season.  He glories in the approach of winter.  I'm a kindred spirit of anyone who loves November...

 My Sorrow, when she's here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are as beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

She walks the sodden pasture lane. 

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list:

She's glad the birds are gone away,

She's glad her simple worsted gray

Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

And they are better for her praise.  

~Robert Frost 

1913