Tearing Down the House

This morning I was reading Donald Richie's lovely little book, The Inland Sea, which is an account of his exploration of the islands and communities that surround the long, narrow sea below the main island of Japan. The book was published first in 1971 and reissued in 2002 by Stone Bridge Press. In a section about Shinto shrines, Richie talks about something I had heard when I was in Kyoto last summer but had not understood: that the great shrine of Ise was torn down every twenty years and rebuilt--and that this had been going on for over a thousand years. (I had heard that all shinto shrines are destroyed and rebuilt in this way, but I don't know if that's true.) Richie speaks of this process as being a way of stopping time, not the building of great structures like the pyramids or the Empire State Building, or cathedrals.

Richie doesn't mention cathedrals, but reading his reflections made me think of the church structures we revere so highly in Christianity. My own parish church is an architectural gem, really quite beautiful. Sometimes it seems that we worship the space itself not in the space. This weekend I am off to Philadelphia for a meeting in the cathedral there, which has been redesigned to accommodate rearrangements of the furniture according to different seasons and festivals. I hear that it is an impressive space, although the preservationists were outraged that it had been gutted and rebuilt. I am looking forward to seeing it.

When I was last there, the space was appointed as a traditional gothic church, dark, pews insisting on their right to dominate, everything oriented rigidly to the altar and priest. I was doing a one-man show that I had created in which I played St. Francis of Assisi. The show could be longer or shorter, depending on the situation, but it always began in the same way: I told the story of Francis when he was confronted by the town bishop and his father for stealing from his father to pay for repairs to the local church. Francis takes off his clothes and goes naked into the woods, declaring that his only father is the one in heaven. I took off my clothes, leaving, however, a pair of shorts to protect the delicate.

After the death of St. Francis, some of his followers tried to carry on his practice of radical poverty, wandering the countryside and resisting the pressures of the church heirarchy to create a permanent church structure and begin to make some money off of the pilgrim trade. Eventually, these radical followers of Francis were declared heretics. It was against the gospel to be poor and to wander freely about. (How can the bishop control what you do or how you worship if he doesn't know where you are?)

In my previous post, I spoke about Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, which owns a lot of real estate and has its own impressive tent of meeting. Since then I notice that the churches in Virginia that wish to break with the Episcopal Church authority there are suing to keep their property. In the end, that's what matters most: who gets what possessions in the divorce.

These musings have a point: church buildings are a burden to the faithful. They substitute as objects of worship; they cost too much to maintain; they become the focus of controversy when larger issues should be addressed (as in the case of parishes leaving the fold); they are not intrinsic to the Christian way, which in the beginning was followed in the homes of the faithful.

Quite simply, I suggest that we get rid of them as quickly as we can. When the dissidents leave the official church, we should let them have the buildings and the burden of caring for them. When congregations are too small for massive structures, they should abandon them and convert them to nightclubs, as has happened with one former Episcopal Church in New York. Where feasible, we should sell the churches and allow them to be torn down and replaced by condominiums.

Thirty-five years ago, when I visited the island of Solentiname in the south of Lake Nicaragua--the home of liberation theology--I went to Mass in a shed with no walls. The cows wandered in and out, chewing cud. The whole thing could easily have been blown down by a strong wind. No problem. It would be easy to put it up again. It seems trite to say: it was clear that the church was not the building. It was the people partying with God.

Perhaps we should adopt the Shinto model and tear down our churches every twenty years or so. Think of all the money and grief we would save. Not to mention the high cost of insurance.