Three Anglican cathedrals have set out to increase both their appeal to the public and to get more people into the building.
One has chosen a gin festival, another has built a mini golf course over the flagstones where pilgrims have knelt in prayer since the 7th century, and one has built a helter skelter at the heart of the building.
Pretty predictably, there have been two sets of responses. One group has hailed these as imaginative imitative which will catch the imagination of the public, and make the buildings seem a little more relevant to people who otherwise would not give the faith of the cathedral a second thought; and the other group has protested that the cathedral authorities have misunderstood the purpose of the buildings and their relationship with the public
In every generation the Church faces a live or die challenge. Convert or be converted. Act as an agency for people to encounter the Living God and be forgiven, turned and transformed; or fit into the unforgiving contours of a society that is driven by other forces, other appetites, and smear over their agenda a patina of spirituality that confers a thin covering of political and cultural legitimacy.
There have been moments in history when the church’s failure has been tragically treacherous. The blessing of guns destined to kill Christian German cousins a hundred years ago in the name of the Christ who challenged his followers to meet evil with good and turn the other cheek still burns in the recent memory.
The unquestioning presiding over the hanging, drawing and quartering of elderly Catholic priests guilty of nothing more than baptising the faithful into the Church that carried the Gospels to these islands and celebrating discreet house masses presented as acts of national, political treason still casts a pall of shame across our collective historical memory.
When Jesus went to the cross to bear the sins of humanity he faced not only murder, but mockery. The soldiers had fun at his expense, before they killed him.
Both guns and scaffolds have been the instrumentation of murder, but mockery is no more acceptable just because it is not murder. The trouble with the helter skelter and the pitch and putt is that to anyone with a sense of what Rudolf Otto called ‘the Holy” they constitute an offence of some gravity.
Why should this be?
The Bible offers a narrative of a wide variety of encounters with God. They have the effect of telling us what God is like; and what happens when we encounter him in the raw.
These encounters can be nuclear. For Moses at the bush that would not burn, the first requirement was to remove his shoes. Bare foot and bare souled, we cannot hide from the searchlight of the God who knows all our thoughts and motivations.
Moses was to discover later that on the mountain he could not look on the face of God and live. Isaiah was to encounter God in a vision in the temple, and survived his commission by either literally or figuratively having a live coal held to his mouth to purify it.
In the presence of Jesus, when he began to grasp who Jesus, Peter fell to his knees and explained “depart from me for I am a sinful man”.
St Paul left an encounter with the risen Christ blinded in sight and reconfigured in the heart.
As the letter to the Hebrews puts it “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10).
The Church has the difficult business of conveying the awe, majesty and sheer danger of God while at the same time offering the safety, the healing, the forgiveness and the mercy of Christ.
This creative tension between transcendence and immanence is a challenge to hold in creative tension, but it reflects the complexity of human experience and the judgement of mercy of God.
One of the characteristics of our astonishing Norman cathedrals is the way in which the architecture does just that. It lifts our minds and our hearts to the intimation of majesty grandeur, awe, immensity and by the difference in scale, our own insignificance by contrast. And at the same time offers us the presence of Christ as Lord and Saviour, who asks to be invited into the depths of our heart to forgive, heal and recreate in an act of the most profound metaphysical intimacy.
A pre-requisite for an encounter with God is a willingness to encounter Him. Not all moments in our lives are equally propitious, as not all places are either.
But to enter a cathedral is to walk into a building that physically represents an immense image of Christ on the cross, arms outstretched in the north and south transepts, with head slightly tilted in exhaustion and suffering towards the high altar.
The building itself has the capacity to speak at so many levels to the mind and the soul for anyone who walks in willing to make themselves vulnerable to an encounter with the living God.
There is one thing and one thing in particular that can break this alchemy, distraction.
We live in a culture addicted to distraction and pleasure seeking. The dynamics of this are potent antidotes to experiencing the presence of God. They are everywhere. We experience a saturation of stimulation and distraction in everyday life. It is almost if the pace and pleasure of life set out to make reflection and prayer impossible.
The one place one might be free of this could be, ought to be a cathedral.
But for such a place, steeped in mystery and marvel to buy in sensory pleasure and distraction is to poison the very medicine it offers the human soul. It cracks the exquisite mirror it holds up before the presence of God; it drowns out the still, small voice, that Elijah encountered and adored.
Faced with the challenge to convert or be converted, the Church of England appears to be willing to surrender to the preoccupations and preferences of the lost people it was sent to save. But since it may no longer believe in heaven and hell, salvation and judgement, it may have downgraded itself to be a distracting, source of spirituality, offering distraction and entertainment rather than healing to sick souls.
It may well be religion, but not as Jesus knew it, taught it, commissioned it or recognises it.
What does “helter skelter” mean in Olde Blighty? To an American of a certain age it has a violent connotation.
Apparently to the Brits, it is some sort of amusement park slide- photographs of this desecration make it look like a 40′ tall Dr Who Dalek wearing a party hat.
Given recent events in the US, if the cathedral actually calls it that (which apparently it does- its all over the British press), they should rethink the name. Random, extraordinarily violent acts of murder (what it means in the US, used as the description for the Manson murders in 1969- and as a description of similar carnage since then) is an inappropriate title for children’s playground. Especially now.
Well, I suppose they can sell all the cathedrals to the new Trinity Wall Street- Disney project (I am not kidding, there is one).
Of course, whoever first called these slide contraptions “helter skelters” no doubt meant it in its original sense- “disordered confusion”- which applies to all the CoE cathedrals, whether they have slides or not.
Yes TJ, it’s a children’s slide at fun fairs. The American usage of that term is largely unknown here in England, and culturally the helter skelter in the uk is a prominent feature at fairs and has been for decades, so notwithstanding the American meaning, I’m not sure I would agree that they shouldn’t call it that.
I would agree it shouldn’t be in there though.
In Australia to my knowledge it is an adverbial phrase referring to something being done with great rapidity.
To a large extent I agree with Gavin, with the proviso that we should be wary of giving too much significance to buildings. As a must-do on this occasion, I would point out that post-Reformation Anglicans cathedrals should not have altars or high altars. One searches in vain in 1662, the official liturgical standard for the national church in which I worship*, for a mention of an “altar” in church buildings.
*My Sydney friends may ignore this word.
To a large extent I agree with Gavin, with the proviso that we should be wary of giving too much significance to buildings. As a must-do on this occasion, I would point out that post-Reformation Anglicans cathedrals should not have altars or high altars. One searches in vain in 1662, the official liturgical standard for the national church in which I worship*, for a mention of an “altar” in church buildings.
*My Sydney friends may ignore this word.
Why is there a clown celebrating the eucharist?
Personally, a golf course in a cathedral pales into insignificance when presented with that demonic grinning buffoon desecrating the mass.
Maybe they were having a mission to the clown community, which before long will no doubt be a protected group like the rest. What next, a mass for those who perform street mime????
The clown eucharist was held at Trinity Church, Wall Street. Considering the amount of money they spend in order bankroll the propagation of warped gender ideology and to influence communion structures and all things Lambeth, there is at least something fitting about them celebrating a clown eucharist (fitting – but not good or right).
Yes, my thoughts exactly
Fr. K.,
You could not be more correct! In his “Short Treatise on the Supper of the Lord” John Calvin wrote: “… it is still more perverse to celebrate the Supper with mimicry and buffoonerey …, as if the Supper were a kind of magical trick.”
The third paragraph Dr Ashenden says “There have been two sets of responses”. There is another one which I decline to write here. It would make a Sailor blush.
I believe Gavin Ashenden has a very important voice in today’s battle for the soul of Anglicanism. I constantly learn from him. But, while I share his distress that a cathedral should become a place of shallow stunts with flimsy or non existent justification, I look at church buildings somewhat differently.
We Christians preach ‘Christ crucified’, and that is at the heart of our gospel, but the climax or seal of the story is his glorious resurrection and ascension. And in that knowledge we are liberated as Christians to live as those who are newborn into an eternal life where we are no longer under condemnation: death really does have no more dominion over us. Surely it is that new life (Jesus resurrected and ourselves reborn) which should bring us to church rather than recollection or re-enactment or continuation of sacrifice.
If our church buildings are architecturally designed as huge crosses, and with alters as their focus, could it be that such a design pulls us back from the triumph of Easter and continually threatens us with the horror of crucifixion? And could that horror become a cause for uncertainty that ‘it is finished’, and that we now live in the Christian era of resurrection? Should our church buildings really direct us (by their architecture and ornamentation) to the spiritual limbo of Good Friday and Easter Saturday, or does God wish that we would step forward in our focus to where Jesus’s work of salvation is complete and where Christ reigns in Heaven, yet amazingly offers to live in our hearts if we will only accept him?
Lest anyone should be horrified at any downgrading of the importance of the cross and our daily need for repentance and renewal, I’d suggest our Anglican liturgy never forgets to start at the point of confession and repentance. And we have the Lord’s Supper – the New Passover – as often as we observe it, so that we may never forget the cost of salvation.
So I’m not arguing for mindless, complacent celebration. But we are in a spiritual battle; we need to be uplifted and strengthened. When we meet together, having entered into the sorrow of our sinfulness, we need to look out and up to Him who lives and reigns supreme, who sustains us and toughens us up for the fight, who has forgiven and continues to forgive.
I’d like church buildings (of whatever size and style) which portray an assurance of resurrection victory while also meeting the requirement for stillness and quiet prayer. (Perhaps that’s not an easy architectural brief!) Golf courses and helter-skelters tell me nothing whatsoever of God.
I believe Gavin Ashenden has a very important voice in today’s battle for the soul of Anglicanism. I constantly learn from him. But, while I share his distress that a cathedral should become a place of shallow stunts with flimsy or non existent justification, I look at church buildings somewhat differently.
We Christians preach ‘Christ crucified’, and that is at the heart of our gospel, but the climax or seal of the story is his glorious resurrection and ascension. And in that knowledge we are liberated as Christians to live as those who are newborn into an eternal life where we are no longer under condemnation: death really does have no more dominion over us. Surely it is that new life (Jesus resurrected and ourselves reborn) which should bring us to church rather than recollection or re-enactment or continuation of sacrifice.
If our church buildings are architecturally designed as huge crosses, and with alters as their focus, could it be that such a design pulls us back from the triumph of Easter and continually threatens us with the horror of crucifixion? And could that horror become a cause for uncertainty that ‘it is finished’, and that we now live in the Christian era of resurrection? Should our church buildings really direct us (by their architecture and ornamentation) to the spiritual limbo of Good Friday and Easter Saturday, or does God wish that we would step forward in our focus to where Jesus’s work of salvation is complete and where Christ reigns in Heaven, yet amazingly offers to live in our hearts if we will only accept him?
Lest anyone should be horrified at any downgrading of the importance of the cross and our daily need for repentance and renewal, I’d suggest our Anglican liturgy never forgets to start at the point of confession and repentance. And we have the Lord’s Supper – the New Passover – as often as we observe it, so that we may never forget the cost of salvation.
So I’m not arguing for mindless, complacent celebration. But we are in a spiritual battle; we need to be uplifted and strengthened. When we meet together, having entered into the sorrow of our sinfulness, we need to look out and up to Him who lives and reigns supreme, who sustains us and toughens us up for the fight, who has forgiven and continues to forgive.
I’d like church buildings (of whatever size and style) which portray an assurance of resurrection victory while also meeting the requirement for stillness and quiet prayer. (Perhaps that’s not an easy architectural brief!) Golf courses and helter-skelters tell me nothing whatsoever of God.
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