Tatoo Me Too! (Ta2 Me 2 U)

Church buildings, I think, are like personal accessories. Sometime they look great, sometimes jaded, sometimes far too expensive for anyone to be wearing. Plus, someone who keeps sporting the same string of pearls over and over, well it’s a little strange, don’t you think?

Don’t get me wrong, I like accessories. I think tattoos are very cool. That arabesque around your shoulder, it blows me away, but twenty five years later it might perhaps be a teensy sad.

When I was seventeen the seminary I was joining took me on a road trip to see its flagship church, a big bright sixties glass and brick affair. I had a moment of pure revolt. I don’t know why, something to do with modernism I suppose. It went away, which was good because I lived next to that church for six years, and served in it for four. While I was serving there I generally forgot rebellious feelings, focusing on the people who used the building. I even got to like a little its upbeat sunlit space.

But now I remember the seventeen-year-old, and other stuff too. St. Peter’s in Rome used to be a stamping ground of mine. I spent a year out there as a student and sometimes went to its Sacrament chapel to pray. But over the years the air disappeared from its marbled vaults. When I went inside I felt I was turning to stone myself. Today I think I wouldn’t even get through security. It would short-out on the spot. It’s not because I don’t recognize great richness in the Catholic tradition, but because the buildings themselves have lost their sign-value, their meaning. Back then I once said to a church higher-up that it wouldn’t matter if the basilica of St. Peter’s was wiped off the face of the earth, Christianity would survive: he looked shocked and struggled for a moment, but eventually admitted I was right.

I think a great many of those buildings will go. They will be torn down. Already the Roman Catholic diocese of this area of the U.S. has closed a half dozen or so churches, despite the fact as many argue there are viable congregations attached to them. As Marx said, it’s the bourgeoisie who are the real revolutionaries; they’ll tear anything down. But the closure of R.C. parishes is really just a sideshow to what I’m talking about.

Take, for example, the so-called “Megachurches.” These places are not church buildings in any traditional sense. They’re out on deserted link roads, accessible only by car. They’re not so much “churches” as warehouses, transferable sports stadia. They are meaningless as signs of the gospel. Anything that’s evangelical in them takes place in small groups, virtually irrelevant to the huge complex. Meanwhile those vast auditoria simply say, “Look at us. We’re big and important.” And, “Oh, by the way, did we mention Jesus?”

The point is the people who run those townless temples have already deserted community in favor of an aircraft hangar, an occupiers’ base-camp. Meanwhile the denominations that hang on to the dusty street-corner buildings, and the decaying downtown cathedrals, are fighting a slow losing war of attrition, propped up by nostalgia as a mode of being religious.

Because, when we get down to it, the semiotics of church architecture is a dead duck. By that I mean the communicative significance of those buildings is over. What Peter Berger calls the “sacred canopy” has vanished from the public space and the churches’ role in presenting it has collapsed. That’s what they were, tent poles of a sacred order, and it’s gone. But what is not over, by any means, is the direct experience of human relationship. Therefore the future is in the house church, or the small group able to meet just about anywhere, where relationships have space to grow and deepen for themselves.

Architects will get on with their business of designing human spaces, externally and internally. The future they will build will probably be like the local shopping mall, but with emphasis on civic life as something to be consumed, i.e. enjoyed; they will envision communal living space and even spirituality, they will create beautiful artificial town centers to meet and associate in. If Christians want a large place to meet, they’ll be able to go there. And they’ll want to too!

Meanwhile, the real canopy we’re under is digital. Signs of relationship multiply, like biological cells, on the Internet, not necessarily in any positive or redemptive sense, but as signs they are astronomically prolific. Facebook has more than 200 million active members and tens of thousands join daily. Celebrities on Twitter can outdo CNN breaking news in the number of followers they get. This means that the public arena of meaningful signs is displaced more and more from the physical or real environment to an electronic, virtual one. At the same time—of course—people need direct person-to-person relationship in the flesh, and more than ever. Young people find it difficult to construct long term relationships in a world of pixels and texting. This, in sum, places the onus on the beloved community. Instead of fractured fragmentary relationships, the gospel says there is one single singular relationship of love through time and through space and in these circumstances it is this which begins to stand out really clearly.

Love one another as I have loved you! Simple, and difficult and necessary as that. That’s where the new Christian semiotics is. I wear my “church” accessory around my wrist. Or is it on my arm? It’s invisible, I know, but not quite. Sometimes it gets smudged but that doesn’t take it away. Perhaps sometimes others can see it. Perhaps I can see it on others. “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is as strong as death… many waters cannot quench love….” (Song of Songs, 8:6-7)

Tony