Souls Not Stones

Where does a Christian pray?

In her soul. In the soul of her neighbor. In her dreams.

When I say soul I also mean body. I mean soul as the dense neural life of the body itself, not another entity. But I say soul because this dense life is also expansive and imitative and connects itself with all other beings. “Soul” captures this meaning while “body” sounds more individual. So it is the body/soul or soul/body which prays.

What then is the value of the physical space designated for prayer: a church, a shrine, a temple?

The only value of the physical space, it seems to me, is that it allows the soul to gather with her neighbor souls to do publically what she does all the time. Art and architecture may help, but they may also hinder. A physical space can carry the soul on pathways which other souls have imagined for her, along which she may glimpse things she never met before. But for the same reasons they can become confining, or, worse still, an end in themselves. We can begin to believe that only with the set of responses modeled by this place can a soul pray. Jesus said, “Believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth…”

Thinking about architecture, what is the most vital human architecture today? Surely the internet, a vast cathedral where all souls meet! And its very indifference to all particular religious forms, to all local architectures, renders Jesus’ words more relevant than ever. The internet displaces human imagination from stones to the soul itself, to the endless medium of communication that is the very essence of human being.

A Christian prays in her soul, in the souls of her neighbors, in her dreams.

At the core of a Christian’s dreams is a yearning and a foretelling—of the time when the whole earth will be a universe of united souls.

Now is the time, therefore, when Christians search more and more deeply in their souls, in their neighbors’ souls, in their dreams, for the living connective tissue that will make that dream a reality.

Now is not the time, therefore, to put confidence in the stones of place, but rather in the meeting of souls, wherever that takes place. Now is the time even deliberately to abandon the stones of place in order to discover the meeting of souls.

To be free for the dream.