Church: A Place Where Mystery Happens - #4

The document, Environment and Art in Catholic Worship, offered principles for the church building. The introductory part is a beautiful meditation and edification.

"1. Faith involves a good tension between human modes of expressive communications and God himself, whom our human tools can never adequately grasp. God transcends. God is mystery. God cannot be contained in or confined by any of our words or images or categories

2. While our words and art forms cannot contain or confine God, they can, like the world itself, be icons, avenues of approach, numinous presences, ways of touching without totally grasping or seizing. Flood, fire, the rock, the sea, the mountain, the cloud, the political situations and institutions of surrounding periods - in all of them Israel touched the face of God, found help for discerning a way, moved toward the reign of justice and peace. Biblical faith assures us that God covenants a people through human events and calls the covenanted people to shape human events

3. And then in Jesus, the Word of God is flesh: `This is what we proclaim to you: what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and our hands have touched - we speak of the word of life.

4. Christians have not hesitated to use very human art in their celebration of the saving work of God in Jesus Christ, although in every period they have been influenced, at times inhibited, by cultural circumstances. In the resurrection of the Lord, all things are made new. Wholeness and healthiness are restored, because the reign of sin and death is conquered. Human limits are still real and we must be conscious of them. But we must also praise God and give God thanks with the human means we have available. God does not need liturgy; people do, and people have only their own arts and styles of expression with which to celebrate.

5. Like the covenant itself, the liturgical celebrations of the faith community (Church) involve the whole person. They are not purely religious, or merely rational and intellectual exercises, but also human experiences calling on all human faculties: body, mind, senses, imagination, emotions, memory. Attention to these is one of the urgent needs of contemporary liturgical renewal.

6. If we maintain that no human works or art forms can contain or exhaust the mystery of God's love, but that all words and art forms can be used to praise God in the liturgical assembly, then we look for criteria to judge music, architecture, and the other arts in relation to public worship.

Two qualities help us to worship well. The first is a climate of hospitality. Hospitality allows us to be comfortable with one another. It allows us to be seated together with some flexibility and mobility so that we can see each other and the focal points of the rites. Hospitable space helps us to be participants, not spectators. Secondly, good environments foster a God-consciousness, help us to be God-centered. They invite contemplation through a simple and attractive beauty. "12. One should be able to sense something special (and nothing trivial) in everything that is seen and heard, touched and smelled, and tasted in liturgy."

Hospitality allows us to reverence each other as icons of God. Simple and attractive beauty helps us to contemplate and cherish the living God.