Sitting in Churches: A Love Letter To Architecture, Spirituality, and Solitude
It’s a few days post Easter and I am sitting in my bed, a freshly peeled orange perched on my right knee, with the face of a now passed Pope Francis staring up at me from the front page of the New York Times. After watching Conclave, attending a Catholic High school, and deconstructing high-demand religion, I would’ve expected myself to pass through this moment relatively unaffected. But here I am, mentally sitting in a puddle of sad discomfort instead. Maybe it’s the unease of everything in the world at this moment, and the fact that this is yet another issue added to an already swaying, too-tall stack of other problems. But what I mainly believe it to be is that it feels like the last bit of my religiosity is slipping away, and right at the end of Holy Week, no less.
I grew up religious, but not in an aesthetic, euro-centric way that allows me to tote around vintage rosaries or buy a Brandy Melville crop top with Jesus's face emblazoned on it. My childhood was spent in lackluster church buildings that smelled like musty burlap-esque fabric, where the cries of babies echoed down hallways, crayons with bite marks or stale goldfish littered the floor, and atrociously yellowed overhead lighting gave headaches after a good 5 minutes (even if your eyes were closed, as I often found mine). There was nothing to romanticize besides a singular magnolia tree outside of the chapel window and the occasional violin or flute solo played by a congregant.
To give you a visual
As I got older and started making friends outside of my church, I found myself asking them what their Sundays were like: What does your chapel look like? Do you sing hymns? How often do you go? How long is your church? The last one I asked more frequently, as for some years I was in said musty church building for 3 hours on Sundays, and was always jealous of those who were out playing on a slip-and-slide instead of sitting cross-legged in a perfectly uncomfortable dress. I was constantly probing for Sunday rituals to be jealous of. When I was sitting in the pews with my family, I would fold myself in half, head facing the ground, and close my eyes, reimagining the space I was in. There were soaring stained glass windows, ornately carved mahogany pews, a grand organ with too many brass pipes to count, checkered marble flooring polished so thoroughly my imaginary face would stare back at me in its reflection, Corinthian columns lining the aisles, and gold leaf embossing all the details my little hands could trace. Not unlike Sainte-Chapelle in France, if you want a good visual. And then I would open my eyes and be rudely greeted by a drooling baby with patchy hair or the back of an old man's head who desperately needed to clean his ears. But I told myself (or rather others impressed upon me and I came to rehearse the same line), that the reason we go to church on Sundays is to better ourselves, and it has nothing to do with the meeting house we find ourselves in. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would maybe understand the overwhelming, tears-running-down-the-face type spirituality that everyone else described if only I were afforded a more beautiful place to sit, even if the pew was still uncomfortable.
And, many years later, I can confirm to my younger self that I was not wrong.
Despite all the unpleasantness and my eventual exit from religious belief, I find myself in chapels often. Wherever I go, my family and I find basilicas, cathedrals, monasteries, or rotting wood churches off of abandoned highways to sit in the pews irrespective of the religion worshipped there. At first, I didn’t find this tradition too odd. Everyone went to cathedrals on their foreign vacations. Pictures of heavenly painted ceilings are littered throughout the Instagram stories I see every summer. However, my interest in churches started to become more apparent when I found myself going out of my way to visit them.
I was always told that church was a “come as you are” type of place, but it never quite felt that way in actuality. I was expected to dress up, arrive on time, answer questions, and play the part of obedient adolescent #4. Not only that, but going to church never made me feel special. Maybe that is selfish of me to say, but I don’t care much because it’s true. All those days that I was sardined into classrooms with other nose-picking, marker-covered, uncomfortable children made me feel like I was part of a reluctant mass that needed teaching, rather than an individual readied to receive a thoughtful sermon. This is why I much preferred it when there was nobody in the chapel at all. At most, maybe a choir practicing in the off part of the day, starting and stopping their song to perfect the pitches and harmonies, that bounced around the walls until they eventually fell into my ears. Even my church building, stale and cobwebbed in odd corners, was beautified in the times when it sat empty. Occasionally, my family and I would go in on a Saturday night to clean the chapel, with breakfast food for dinner promised as payment for our half-hearted service. Normally, I loathed this assignment and thought about the syrup and butter, and freshly squeezed orange juice awaiting me at the diner down the road. However, one Saturday Afternoon, as I vacuumed up the last of a pile of obliterated Gerber baby grain puffs off the floor, I decided to sit back on the pew and look around. All of it was prettier in the dark, even the fake brass light fixtures and popcorn-textured ceiling. Light poured in from the window where the magnolia tree sat just outside, the beams made more solid by the dust particles floating in the air. I was all alone, no lights turned on, only the muffled sound of vacuums whirring in classrooms outside. Still, I was overwhelmed by the simple beauty in it all. The quiet time I was unknowingly given to notice all the things around me, and appreciate them for how they were, that was holy.
The church at Mt. Angel. Photo taken by me
The church at Mt. Angel Abbey (just up the road by about an hour and a half) holds a special place in my heart for similar reasons, even if I am not its target religious audience. When I first visited, I was still attending Sunday School consistently, and walking through the aisles and along the stations of the cross was interesting in the same way it is interesting to go into the pantry for a snack at your friend's house. It is organized differently, built to meet the needs of the people who attend it, but ultimately, you are there to be satiated (spiritually in the case of churches, maybe with a Rice Krispies or Goldfish in the case of the pantry). The Abbey’s campus was well manicured, but I mostly remember being sticky, hot, and my feet aching incessantly.
In January of this year, I visited again, and instead of going in as a cautious foreigner, afraid to disrupt the order normally kept there, I sat down and invented a sort of religious service for myself. I wasn’t saying prayers (at least the traditional kind with both hands steepled together) or reading a bible, rather I was sitting with myself, and the building, and seeking out what I found special in that moment. That’s where all my past Sundays had gone wrong. I was devoting 2-3 hours at the end of my week towards the pursuit of “bettering myself” by reading about a faraway past and thinking much too far into a promised eternal future. There was no peace in doing this; in fact, I think it probably encouraged more existential anxiety than anything. Whereas now, seats empty, no organ music playing, no dog-eared bible pages, or hymn books flipped open, I can find a new sort of spirituality in it all. Something much more personal: a sweet solitude, peace uninterrupted, and all the little details of my surroundings made brilliant by the silence, preaching to me how beautiful everything can be if I just take a moment to sit down and notice.