A couple of days ago, I wrote a post slamming the
Pope for his muddled thinking on the nature of salvation. Well, this morning, I
ran across the above article entitled “Why Christianity Should be Patron of the
Arts,” written by a Catholic apologist named Barbara Nicolosi. Although she
writes about her struggles with the Catholic version of church, her complaints
can be universally applied, I think, to most all of Christianity. Reading this article,
I found myself thinking that if I were a Catholic, I could have written it,
because so much of what she says, I have felt for years.
I will not here lay out her entire case. That’s why
I provide the above link. This is an argument that you need to read in its entirety,
if you’re interested, to form your own judgment. But one thing she said
practically jumped off the page.
Too many churches are not an
ante-chamber of heaven in their interiors, but instead are ugly, drooping,
often “in the round” spaces calculated to distract us not by the Divine, but by
each other. Banal banners and signs, plastic or half-hearted flowers, filthy
carpets, stained ceilings, and ugly oak pews with the varnish half gone. There
is truly, nothing to look at, never mind by which to be inspired.
What she is describing is that strange melancholy
that comes over me every time I walk into most church buildings, an unnamed disappointment
that I feel at the ordinariness of it all. The architecture is about as far
away from majestic as humanely possible. Yes, I know, that one can have an
encounter with God in a barn, but why must the place where we are meant to have
weekly encounters with him be so pedestrian?
Anyway, give this
article a read and let me know what you think.
We were talking about our church's appearance in our Deacon's meeting this morning. Why do we, and many others, accept the condition of the Lord's house that we would not accept in our own house?
ReplyDelete"In Protestantism, the impulse to imitate pop-culture in the Church comes from the desire to be loved by the world. "
ReplyDeleteI feel this is EXACTLY what is going on in our church right now....and it's sad and disgusting!