One of the highlights of my trip to New York a few weeks ago was an evening with my friend PR. PR is one of the reasons I love Facebook--we have truly delicious arguments there about all sorts of things, and a few people have told me that any time they see PR's name on a thread I've started, they read it, because they know it will be good. It had been ten years since I had last seen him, but we are much better friends now than we were then, and it's all thanks to Facebook.
PR is getting a PhD at Yale in early medieval religious history (6th to 9th century), so of course we talked about religion. He grew up black and Episcopalian in New York, and over martinis I asked him if he liked going to church. "I did," he said. "I liked taking time for the sacred. And you could tell it was sacred because you could look around at the building you were in and the clothes the priest was wearing and you could listen to the music being played on some magnificent organ and you could notice the rituals you were engaging in, and it all obviously wasn't profane, so it had to be sacred."
"That's an incredibly good point," I said, "and it helps me understand part of my dissatisfaction with Mormonism. Because you could look at everything in a contemporary Mormon worship service, and it clearly was profane, so it couldn't be sacred."
This actually upset PR, and he insisted I elaborate. "Have you seen an LDS meeting house?" I asked. "From the outside, they look like they could be post offices or middle schools, and they look about the same from the inside. Actually, I'm going to with the middle school thing. Inside the actual chapel in most meeting houses, there's absolutely no religious iconography--Mormons are thorough protestants--and even though there's a rostrum at the front, it's so plain and utilitarian that it might as well be part of a middle school auditorium. There's all this cold, exposed brick, and almost no windows or natural light--don't want those seventh graders looking out the window and daydreaming. And then, when you consider how deadly dull most of the talks are--lectures about the evils of profanity, or the importance of paying tithing, it's all about as conducive to worship and contemplation of the sacred as a lecture on not running in the halls.
"Then there's the fact that most of the building consists of classrooms with white board and folding chairs, and that the center of the building, its heart, is a basketball court...."
He started laughing. "What?" he asked. "A basketball court? You're going to have to draw this for me."
So I did. I got a cocktail napkin and a pen and sketched out for him how the inner sanctum of the meeting house is a carpeted basketball court. "This explains a lot about Mormons," he said.
We never got around to discussing the relief society room or the kitchen, and the whole funeral potatoes thing. I did complain about how uninspired the landscaping at most LDS buildings is, while it's downright non-existent at others--and I mean non-existent, as in no land, just asphalt. (One reason I so mourn the chapel I grew up attending church in is that it had BEAUTIFUL landscaping, including a pecan grove, a canal, a courtyard, and lots of flower beds. But that church burned down in 1981, and was replaced with one of the post-office-type buildings.) We also never get around to discussing all the crayons and cheerios a typical sacrament meeting involves, given the Mormon penchant for having lots of kids, really quickly.
But I think PR was right and that our buildings explain a lot about us. We are a profane religion. We don't really care about the sacred. Even our vision of heaven is one where our profane lives just continue forever. We'll still be married and have bodies and kids and callings and jobs, but we'll wear white robes while we do those jobs, and they'll last forever. No harps, no clouds, no praising something glorious. No. Mormons' idea of paradise is family obligations and work, for all eternity. Our idea of the sacred is just to have to transplant the profane to a part of the universe called Kolob.
I's just so damn depressing. Of course, it wouldn't be quite so depressing if Mormons' profane existences weren't so limited, so circumscribed, so small, so goddamn correlated and thus so devoted to the mediocre and pragmatic, and so indifferent to the beautiful and transcendent. All you have to do is look at the hideous correlated cookie-cutter buildings we construct to realize that we have no visual or intellectual vocabulary for beauty.
A blog I really like these days is LDS Architecture. (I admit I like it partly because most days it's just a photo and a quick caption, so it's very easy to get it out of my reader. My two other favorite photo-and-caption blogs are Unhappy Hipsters and the Daily Levitation.) It provides photos of interesting and unique meeting houses--many of which have been sold, and replaced with awful correlated buildings.
Beauty might be uniform and symmetrical, it might involve patterns and repetitions, but it's not correlated. Beauty requires something unique, some spark of genius, and genius can't be correlated. Nor can transcendence. It can be courted and cultivated, but it can't be correlated.
However individual Mormons might feel about transcendence (personally, I think a lot of them are starved for it; I know I was), the brethren fear it because it can't be correlated. So they eschew it, try to kill it.
And that is why Mormonism is the most profane of religions.
Mormons save their sacred architecture for the temple. If you want to experience the Mormon "sacred," that's where you need to go.
I know that's the standard explanation, but I don't think it flies. First of all, temples these days are fairly uninspired, correlated cookie-cutter things as well, dominated by theaters where people fall asleep.
Second, as LDS Architecture argues (and it's a position I agree with), "the greatest architectural legacy of the LDS Church is in the Meetinghouse designs."
The temples are by and large modeled on the Salt Lake Temple, and it's not an impressive building. I always thought it was simply my bias as an Arizonan that made me prefer the Arizona Temple to the SLC Temple, until I found this statement from Rudyard Kipling, published in Architectural Record:
I have to agree with that statement. I can see the temple from my apartment building, and it is not an impressive design. The cathedral of the Madeleine, a few blocks from the temple, is a much more beautiful and sacred building. The temple has acquired some dignity through age, but the church makes so little effort to honor it, surrounding it with hideous sky scrapers, both residential and commercial.
And even if the temples were magnificent sacred spaces, why on earth should the church "save" their sacred architecture for something its children, its new converts, its "sinners," can't experience? How mean, how punitive, how small, how spiritually stingy that is. Even if full initiation into the sacred is saved for adulthood, the sacred should still be something we should learn to interact with in childhood. We need our whole lives to understand it, and we need to learn to value it as children.
Frankly, I think that the fact that Mormons are so stingy with their sacred transcendence is one reason we are so bad at recognizing and creating it. I think it's one reason I was so spiritually hungry as a teenager: I had no church-sanctioned way to connect to the sacred or transcendent. I had to learn to create it for myself, through my reactions to things like the sublime in nature or art, which certainly worked for me. But it also showed me that I didn't need the church.
And it's also why I feel enriched rather than impoverished after leaving the church. I learned to be happy experiencing the sacred in ways that made sense to me, without worrying when I couldn't warm to the cold, correlated portions of sacredness the church so carefully parceled out.
ICK.
I agree with a lot you say, but I'm not feeling you here. I like Mormon meetinghouses of the past 10-20 years better than most local churches (although I hate the ones from the 1960s and 1970s). And at least they have tall roofs and steeples, which makes them quite different from middle schools and post offices.
And I agree with John about temples; I don't think your rebuttal on those carries the day here.
The bottom line for me is, I don't think the church should be spending any more money than they already do on buildings of any type, and I think they do better than any other faith at getting good mileage out of what they do spend, in quantity as well as quality. Frankly, I don't even necessarily agree with the expenditure on all these multi-million dollar temples.
Oh well, better luck to you next time on appealing to my inner culturally dissatisfied Saint.
Well, Chris, I guess the fact that the church's membership is satisfied with the cheap, crappy buildings it constructs is a good thing, since you're who has to use them.
But overall I think your comment is very sad, and proves all too readily my point about how being Mormon impoverishes and impairs a person's aesthetic sensibilities.
Since they spent so much ($3B?, $5B, $8B?) on it, the city creek mall will probably be the most sacred space they have. 8-)
Holly, my one other thought is that while architecture can contribute to an experience of the sacred, they are not close to being the same thing.
I've just been reading HEAVEN BELOW by Grant Wacker, a history of Pentecostalism. He talks about how Pentecostals have almost gone out of their way to avoid costly "sacred" architecture, preferring storefronts, warehouses and even rehabilitated saloons to consecrated church buildings. It's almost as if they were trying to make a statement that the sacred is NOT about the kind of building we worship in, it's about the relationship with God. For Pentecostals, the sacred is defined by the presence of the Holy Spirit, not by the surroundings in which that presence is experienced.
I think Mormons are much closer to Pentecostals in terms of this understanding than to Catholics. Mormons similarly experience the sacred in the presence of the Spirit. If people are bored or falling asleep or uninspired in an LDS meeting, nobody would think to blame that on the architecture or on the lack of liturgical flare. Mormons expect to connect with the sacred if our hearts are in the right place, if we are obeying the commandments, and if we truly desire to have the Spirit in our lives.
The temples are important -- again! -- not because of their architecture, but because of their function. Because in the temple Mormons perform ordinances that endow this life with eternal meaning.
But for Mormons, our homes are temples too. Home is also where Mormons connect with the sacred...
I was thinking about churches in old convenience stores last night. The significant thing about them is that people who worship in such places typically cultivate ecstatic experiences and lose their sense of place. If you're carried away by the spirit to some other realm, then it truly doesn't matter where you start out.
Given the way Mormons are taught to consider their churches "special" buildings, where certain behaviors such as running, speaking noisily, shouting, fervently expressing what you feel in your heart, etc, are absolutely inappropriate, I would have to disagree.
And were what you're saying truly the case, then even TEMPLES could be storefronts. But they're not. They're great and (somewhat) spacious buildings, costly, uniform, and uninspired.
Well, so do most religious people. Seriously: duh. Communion with the ineffable, the sacred, the transcendent IS the sacred.
But what harms Mormons' pursuit of the sacred are the facts that A) unlike Catholics or Episcopalians, they do so little to encourage an aesthetic response that opens one up to the sacred and B) unlike Pentacostals, they don't allow ecstatic transportation.
Catholics, Episcopalians and Pentacostals all engage in worship. Mormons do not. Their meetings are entirely about exhortation and instruction.
For Mormons, the spirit is portrayed as not as something transcendent and grant, but as something small.
That's patently untrue, and I don't know how you can assert that no Mormon would even think to blame the ennui and stupor so often induced by a Mormon meeting on the surroundings in which they occur or the content of the meeting itself. I have heard many people complain about the bad lighting, the coldness of slump block interiors, the general ugliness of chapels, just as I have heard many Mormons blame their boredom on the inferior quality of the talks and the indifference to music.
Perhaps.
But others of us expect to connect to the sacred if our hearts are in the right place, if we are living ethical lives, and if we truly desire to have a sense of the sacred in our lives.
And we see that hanging out in ugly, smelly buildings with people who justify and propagate homophobia and misogyny doesn't help with that goal, and that there are superior ways of cultivating the sacred in our lives.
if that's the case, why did you write, "Mormons save their sacred architecture for the temple"? And what makes you think that function and form aren't inter-related?
I wouldn't argue that any sacred building is important because of its architecture, and I don't think an architect would say that, either. That's not how we think of the spaces we create and use. Rather, we mark, facilitate and intensify the importance of what happens in a space by shaping it in deliberate and unique ways. Even in our homes and our commercial spaces, we use architecture to communicate something about our values--to others and to ourselves. And, in the case of sacred buildings, we use architecture to open up communication with the sacred, the transcendent and the divine.
THAT is the point of sacred architecture. And Mormons don't get it, as you and Chris are demonstrating so well.
?
This is what I'm saying about the difference between the sacred and the profane. If there's no difference, then there's no difference.
Do you wear white pants, a funny hat and a green apron in your home? Do you require women who enter your home to wear a veil?
Sure, I can have certain sacred experiences in my home: really great sex, an incredible yoga or mediation session. But that does not make my home a temple. You don't LIVE in a temple. You LIVE in your home. The spaces have different functions, different requirements, and we have different feelings about each. They communicate different things--to us, and to those who enter them.
You are proving my point that Mormons' ideas of the sacred is just to move the profane to an actual physical space called Kolob. The sacred for Mormons is not transcendent, and they do all they can to keep it not-transcendent.
It's just so impoverished, and I can't tell you how sorry your comments make me feel for you.
Today I was at the Sunstone office when I noticed a magazine cover I recognized because I had a poem printed in it 19 years ago. But I hadn't quite seen the cover, somehow; it hadn't registered as something I cared about. You can see the cover here; click on the thumbnail for a bigger view. Martha Bradley's cover story is on "The Mormon Steeple," or, more specifically, "The Mormon Steeple: A Symbol of What?"
Discussing religious buildings, Bradley notes, "The buildings may not tell us all we want to know about God, but they reveal much about the people who build them."
Discussing contemporary Mormon meeting houses, Bradley writes
I recommend the entire article, but that's a passage that supports my basic premise that LDS buildings are profane rather than sacred.
“it's all about as conducive to worship and contemplation of the sacred as a lecture on not running in the halls.”
Precisely. Which is why LDS members are constantly lecturing about being reverent in the chapel. A space that is sacred DEMANDS reverence. You don’t need to tell people to not run or scream or be rowdy in a sacred space – even small children can usually sense this.
Sadly, LDS buildings have morphed into what you are describing, with the basketball court being at the center. It never used to be this way, and there are fortunately still many wonderful buildings out there that pre-date this preoccupation with basketball. You also forgot about the baptismal font which has now been relegated to a closet in a classroom. This is arguably the most sacred ordinance performed in meetinghouses, and yet it gets the least attention. Especially when compared to the font in LDS temples.
My thought is that LDS temples are the attempt at the sacred for Mormons. I agree that they tend towards uninspired standard plans as well, but there are several very successful buildings, such as Mesa, that both relate to place and strive to ascend place by utilizing a main axis which you ascend through temple rituals. Placement of the font and altar as well as spatial qualities, good detailing, beautiful materials and natural light are successfully used.
The one question I want to explore further is that beauty and genius cannot be correlated. Initially I disagree with the premise, but will have to think about this some more.
Hi ptah--
I like this. I've seen it happen often enough when I've visited cathedrals: children start whispering and ask their parents, "What is this place?'
The Mesa temple was always my favorite, partly because it was the temple I saw most often. It's the only place where I've baptisms for the dead, and it was both the very first and very last place I did endowments.
I think it's so beautiful and graceful and I love so much of the landscaping. I still prefer it to the SLC temple. But then, I was just in St. George, and I prefer the St. George temple to the SLC temple.
I checked the dedication date for the Mesa Temple--it was the seventh temple built after the saints got to Utah, and it was dedicated in 1927. The next temple dedicated was Idaho Falls, in 1945--after the end of WWII.
Aside from the Laie Temple, which I have seen in real life and think is pretty but not quite as successful as the Mesa Temple, no other temple resembles it. Whatever made that temple a successful building, either in terms of aesthetics or function, the church didn't see fit to replicate it. (Any idea why not?)
You wrote that baptism
This is a terrific point--I never thought of this. But baptism is also rather messy; you have to fill up the font and then people have to get both wet and naked (when they strip off their wet clothes and put on dry ones). Mormons don't like messiness or nakedness, so I guess it makes sense that they'd prefer not to be reminded of the mechanics of baptism.
Beauty and genius can be copied and replicated, but you can't quantify, nail down and predict what is going to make something truly magnificent, truly successful. For something to be a work of genius, it has to have a spark of surprise--even for the person who creates it. You can't plan to surprise yourself. If you know the plan, you can't be surprised.
I took my (non-Mormon) husband to the Open House of the Preston England Temple and his comment on the celestial room was that it did not even equal the dignity of a corporate board room or five star hotel lobby. He was right. Whilst I find the display of wealth in many cathedrals almost as profane, they are often a reflection of real community sacrifice in an attempt to bring something heavenly to earth. LDS chapels and temples neither reflect real sacrifice nor an effort from a local community to summon the Divine.