You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
1 Peter 2:5
For a designer, space is our playground, and we use things like point, line, plane, and solid, adding color and texture to enhance or contrast. A designer’s knowledge and creative use of those tools provides the richness of any design solution.
We experience form when we know we are inside and there is an outside or when we stand in the dark and look into light. Shape can only arise when there is a physical or sensory change created by a difference in properties. Opposites creates differentiation; and differentiation creates space. To define space requires, at the least, organizing patterns even the most unfamiliar user can recognize. Edges produce circulation; color and texture define shape.
Space creates a language that becomes clearer the more we experience it. Space is defined by changes in geometric forms, but the definition of space is not geometric. It requires a sensing, of a participant interacting with the solids and voids, giving life to the inanimate through experience. Evidence of humans using a space appears in even the smallest of details – a dip worn in stone steps; a frayed textile; a marred wall – and creates a recognizable sense that this is a dwelling, a place for living. Space not only organizes behavior, it also communicates what is significant to those who create and utilize it. Space becomes a place as social memory and experiences fill something that is physical with mental imagery and meaning. As a result, time, interwoven through physical realities, defines place and permits future users to connect with those of the past.
So what might all this mean for us as Christians?
The symbolism found in Church architecture remained virtually unchanged for centuries. Since the days of earliest human existence, we have sought a path to the divine, reaching ever upward, recognizing that the terrestrial world of chaos differed from an ordered celestial world of sacredness. Places of worship communicate a sanctified world replicated from a plan given by God. Moses received instructions from Yahweh on the building of the first tabernacle, chronicled in Exodus 25:9 “Make this tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you.” Solomon made sure the plan for his temple followed the sacred mandate revealed to his father, David, as stated in I Chronicles 28:12 “He gave him the plans of all that the Spirit had put in his mind for the courts of the temple of the Lord and all the surrounding rooms, for the treasuries of the temple of God and for the treasuries for the dedicated things.”
Even ancient religions recognized the necessity of the gods “to fix a point ,” to provide a space separated from larger world, where divinity could reach down to us earth bound souls. Nomadic tribes of Australia often carried a pole, fashioned from the gum tree, that they believed represented the cosmic World Axis and therefore no matter how much they wandered, they remained connected to the celestial realm. If the pole was accidentally broken, however, the tribe faced ruin; with the connection to the divine severed only death could follow. Can you just imagine Boulderites carrying a pole around together??
The first time I visited a Gothic church, looking upward to the ribbed vaults and stain glass windows stories above me, I was very moved. Perhaps you have had a similar experience. For the believer, the church shares a different space from the street. The entrance into the interior separates two modes of being, the profane world of chaos and the sacred world of order, and it is where the passage from the profane to the sacred is possible. At the altar is the Door of Paradise that Christ, upon rising from the grave, opened for us. Our church building is an important place where we can feel safe and unified with the divine and should be cherished as such. Our church building is special, but it is not essential. We as Christians have a greater gift. When God joined with us, taking human form through his son Jesus, it allowed us to carry the sacred with us, everywhere, at all times. We don’t need a pole, we don’t need a specific place to call sacred, we don’t really even need a church building. We have everything within us and it calls us to remember each day of our lives to honor that sacred place we have been so graciously given.