Why Has God Left the Building?

Up to about fifty years ago, if you walked at any time of the day into any of the hundreds of neighborhood Catholic churches in Chicago, the city where I grew up, you would have felt that distinctive otherness which signals the sacred. You would have known that something was there: something wordless and mysterious yet quite real, and something to which you were connected in a very elemental way. We felt that God was somehow right there in the sanctuary of the church, in the tabernacle on the altar, signified by an always-lit candle. The liturgical calendar, with its cycle of masses and other devotions from Advent through Christmas and Easter and on into Ordinary Time, marked the passage of the year. The Divine Office, a book of Psalms and other prayers, marked the passage of the hours by the recitation or singing of prayer at fixed times of the day or night, from Matins and Lauds to Vespers and Compline. God permeated the physical space of the church and neighborhood as well as the daily and yearly cycles of time. The threshold to the sacred was there for all who wanted to cross.

Yet today, to me it seems that the sacredness once felt in the confines of the church is much diminished. A building where a community meets, even a faith community, is quite different than a building in which you know you are in the presence of the divine.

What happened?

Tags: sacred space