Architecture and spirit

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 12, 2014

As we think about how to make our church more hospitable, let’s talk about the language of space, how buildings communicate. If “architecture is frozen music,” what tune are we playing?

Imagine a court room where you enter through a house-sized door into a homey room with couches and tables, lamps and rugs. The walls are painted in decorator colors . There are two circles of chairs, and the judge’s seat is one of the chairs in the inner circle. The judge is in street clothes. The atmosphere is casual. The jury is in the outer circle of chairs watching the proceedings. How would that work? Not well. The courtroom counts on visual cues for its sense of authority. There are the wood-paneled walls, the judge’s bench raised up high, the chairs all facing the judge, the jury off to one side in rows. No matter how shabby a courtroom is, the weight of the law is reinforced by the arrangement of the space.

When you walk into a cathedral in Europe, you know immediately that this is a building where people encounter their idea of God. The atmosphere is hushed and dark. Stained glass windows tell stories from the Bible, and stories of the people who were instrumental in the building process. The light is dim unless the sun is shining directly through the round rose window at the front. The source of light is mostly from just the one place. One source. A cathedral speaks volumes about what the people thought about God, about the priests, about themselves. God is high, high above. The feeling of awe you get from the lift of the space and the richness of the details is maybe a cousin to the awe you would feel for the majesty of God. Magnificence in the building mirrors the magnificence of the divinity, Everything is oriented toward the altar, where the chief miracle of the body and blood takes place, and toward the pulpit, where the Word is read and preached. The pulpit is up high, so people look up to hear the priest. That grants the position some authority. Any church building speaks of what the people think of the human and the divine. Some soar into the heavens. Some UU buildings are low and cradling, without ‘lift’ in the ceiling or in the feel of the room. What they want to express is that it is the community we celebrate. In some UU churches, the people sit in raised levels and the minister stands in the pulpit at floor level, more like a classical Greek amphitheater. In Charleston, one of our two hundred year old churches, the pulpit is raised high — that’s the way they built churches in the 1700’s before the Revolutionary War, when that building was built. Most UU churches in which I’ve preached bought their buildings from other churches or from old synagogues. Those who have built their own spaces tend to be sensible, light-filled, and with views that let the congregation soak up nature as they worship.

A Salt Lake City Tribune article First Unitarian in Salt Lake City this way: “a white-painted light-filled, simple space, impossible to hide in. Every corner is apparent, clearly illuminated by natural light from the tall, multi-paned Palladian windows, recalling the light of reason revered by Unitarianism’s great liberal forbears. The lines, the light, the absence of ornamentation serve as an invitation to introspection and meditation. There is no cross, no icon, no altar. Unitarians focus on this world, not the next. In austere contrast to the colorfully ornate symbolism layered over ancient Christianity, the Unitarian aesthetic, like its gospel, is minimalist: “It’s a simple, basic idea,” says Goldsmith. “We believe in the unity of deity.”

(“Like the faith, (the) Unitarian place of worship is geared to clarity and function,”Mary Brown Malouf, Salt Lake Tribune 7.26.03).

A British architect, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, says “Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.”

We are ramping up a conversation that has been ongoing for many many years in this congregation. The religious education space has been make-do for a while. We’re okay, but it’s time to pull all of the imagining and planning together that’s been done through the years, take a look at it and see what we could afford to do. There is a team of people whose job it is to research the costs and benefits of each option. What would it cost in money and time? What would it cost in terms of the ministers’ energy? The goal is to find a way to live out our mission and our long range plan and whether we can do that on this site or whether we need more space. We’ll be talking about this all Spring, off and on, because there is a lot to consider. What do we want our building to say? Many UU churches are hidden, hard to get to. Many UU buildings are saying “You’ll find us if it’s important enough to you. If you know one of us already. Lots of them are off the road behind lots of trees, with small signs that you can only read at walking speed. It seems to be a shy denomination. You can’t see our church from the street. Almost no one sees us by accident. The people who get here have to really want to get here. That might be the way we want it. This room is filled with light from lots of sources. The shape of the room is simple, as if to say “this is not a complicated faith.” As the Salt Lake article says, we value clarity and function. We have a window with a view of a garden, and nature is central to our sense of what is miraculous. Some UU churches have worship space with moveable chars, and they might have a party or a banquet in the same space in which they worship, as if to say worship and daily life are part and parcel of one another. This room, with its pews, is not that way, and seems to communicate that we are a serious denomination and we take our place among other denominations in the theological conversation.

We know what we want people to feel when they come into the space. Welcome. Safe. Architect Philip Johnson said “All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”Attribution:1975 address at Columbia University, quoted in Philip Johnson: Writings Oxford 79

What is our mission? You see that on the wall. What is our long range plan? I’ve written about it in the newsletter and spoken about it at our congregational meeting. The LRP talks about being a lead church in our denomination, a flagship church. The country is now divided into regions, and our denomination is asking large churches within the regions to be gathering places for people from the smaller churches for trainings, meetings, gatherings of all kinds. We seem already to be a church for whom the arts are an important element, and we would like to build on that strength. Social justice is important to our members too, and maybe we can find ways of intertwining the arts into our social justice outreach. One of the main goals set by the congregation is to be hospitable. This means to have a good place for people to come, a place that speaks of how important we feel about welcome. A place that has room for the folks who need what this church has, and for the people needed by this church. Yesterday at the New Member class I was talking to someone about how each person in this room is like a novel in and of themselves, and then I thought about how many book collectors we have in this congregation and how we dream of having a place for all of our books. We are collecting books here, gathering in people with their stories, trying to live our mission, and asking ourselves “what kind of space is needed so this church can happen?”

The LRP talks about how Austin has grown and is poised to grow in the next twenty years. Do we want to be a mega-church? No. Do we want to grow as big as we can possibly grow? Not really. Not with this minister. You are already a church that starts other churches. Live Oak Congregation and the Wildflower Congregation both grew out of this church. Our Large Church Consultant told us that, for a church to thrive, it needs 2oo members at its start, and a minister, some money and a staff person. We couldn’t spare 200 people from our current membership. Even at 600 members, which is about as big as we could grow with our current facility, we couldn’t spare 200. The LRP says we will have a 500 seat sanctuary so we can grow to 1,000 members. When we get to 800 we’ll take on an assistant minister who would like to have a church of his or her own, and we’ll start gathering 200 folks and raising money for them to go start a new church. It might be the folks who would like to build with straw bales, or have the kind of church where the whole congregation goes to build a house or plant a garden for a school on a Sunday morning.

The LRP calls for us to have space for one or even two artists to have studio space in the church, and we might advertise nation wide for artists to come spend a year with us interacting with the church and the surrounding community as painters, filmmakers or dancers in exchange for the free year of space. The LRP describes us in five years as being known in Austin for being on the forefront of one justice issue, focusing our best talents and efforts on making a change in Central Texas. Will we have rooms for neighborhood meetings, a kitchen we can really cook in? Bathrooms that are truly accessible? Will we have space for doing art with LGBT youth or immigrant youth? What kind of space do we need to accomplish these plans? What about outside space? How does the landscaping speak to who we are as a church? Are we neat and controlled or wild and exuberant? It all speaks. What is it saying? What do we want to say?

What kind of space will we feel moved to support? What kind of space will we be able to buy? Could the landscaping be important to that? Some art? A certain kind of walkway? Frank Lloyd Wright, a Unitarian architect, says “Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.” Attribution: An Organic Architecture MIT 70

What will show a true record of our religious life and how it is lived, how it will be lived?

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul” Ernest Dimnet

Does this building act on the soul of the people who come in? On the soul of the community? Does it encourage people, make them feel at home, make them proud? Make them feel safe? How will the new space act on the soul of those who come in ? What kind of people will the new space attract? Formal people? Informal? Eccentric? Mainstream? I hope it attracts more people like you.

There is one thing I hope doesn’t happen. I have been in a couple of places where there was a new carpet. Suddenly the management was rigid and authoritarian about people not being able to eat or drink in a place that had previously been a comfortable space for milling around, socializing. The level of formality of the place jumped. People stopped using the room until there were enough stains on the floor so the management relaxed enough for the room to be usable again. The spaces we will create are for living in, for having church, having fun, talking and laughing and praying and teaching and dancing in. Like this one. Yes, we dance now and then! It’s good for the soul.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776