So Peter wants to build dwellings?

Preobrazhenie (Novgorod School), source.

Who can blame him? There he is on the Mount of Transfiguration, along with James and John, watching Jesus in conversation with Moses and Elijah. [Context.] In Mark's telling of the same event, the three observers are frightened; it's no wonder that Peter impulsively blurted out something ("Why don't I put up booths for each of you?") that he could do to honor and preserve this amazing moment.

If you are intrigued by this whole incident as much as I am, and want to consider what transfiguration means for your community and yourself, I highly recommend this recent sermon by the pastor of our Friends meeting, Matt Boswell. I'm about to go off on a tangent that Matt is not responsible for, so feel free to follow that link instead of reading on!

My tangent is simply this: when we are feeling overwhelmed by a blazing experience of standing on Holy ground, when we're knocked off our feet and are honestly terrified, how do we respond? Isn't it awfully tempting to reduce the experience to something a bit more structured, a bit more normal? 

Yes, our intentions are the highest: to memorialize the experience. (Peter spontaneously offers to build things that other translators call "dwellings" or "booths," but Eugene Peterson translates them as "memorials.") Maybe I'm completely off track, but this impulse seems linked to an almost universal aspect of organized religion: after the initial blaze has cooled off, we build churches, temples, cathedrals, and other impressive edifices which command and maybe even demand our admiration.

On the other hand, the design and construction of these buildings and grounds might better be seen as expressions of their designers' and builders' devotion. They labored over these projects because they had those kinds of gifts -- to work with their eyes and hands rather than with words and voices. Decades of devoted work might go into a cathedral, and the austere Quakers among us might do well to regard such devotion with a bit of humility. Another thing: the longer the building has been around, serving the community that built it, the more it might seem to become saturated by a spirit of constant prayer.

Every element of a sacred building is part of a vocabulary. This is obviously true of things like altars and icons and stained glass windows, but even the layout and orientation of a typical church expresses theology. When an anti-faith dictatorship takes over the government in that location, and prohibits evangelism and religious education, as happened in Soviet times, this visual vocabulary may have to carry much of the load of communicating faith to new generations.

None of this is simple! Once something is built, it has to be maintained and guarded. The more elaborate the facility, the more maintaining, the more guarding. In Richmond, Indiana, a few years before our historic meetinghouse was demolished, we were in a monthly meeting for business, considering the expensive prospect of putting on a new roof. At that point someone said, "This is the last time I'm approving re-roofing this museum." The first time I visited the offices of the Andrei Rublyov Church in Elektrostal, Russia, I marveled at the elaborate security technology in place, including video cameras and a direct link to the police station. In contrast, Jesus came down from the Transfiguration mountain to face an apparently bleak future: arrest and execution at the hands of the authorities.

D. Elton Trueblood and Martin Luther King in the
Quakerly plain Stout Meetinghouse, Earlham College.

In that Transfiguration encounter, nobody seemed to be reading from a script, least of all the future bishop Peter. As the edifices get built, the scripts are also composed and elaborated. With all our vaunted simplicity, we Quakers have our own versions of the same phenomena -- meetinghouses with their own quiet elegance, some of them three centuries old as we're informed by suitably dignified plaques. Their architecture and seating arrangements suit the changing theology. Their congregations maintain subtle expectations of behavior and decorum that touch on what sorts of Bible readings and sermons are acceptable, how much enthusiasm we can tolerate, how long the silence must be maintained before anyone speaks, how much silence between speakers, and how often any one person can speak (ONCE!). What a difference from the improvised settings (taverns, even) where many early Quakers met ... and sometimes actually quaked.

In choosing what kinds of booths, dwellings, monuments to build in honor of our encounters with God, how do we distinguish what GOD wants? Isaiah (66:1-4; context) cautions us on concealing our own plans behind our piety:

This is what the Lord says:

“Heaven is my throne,
     and the earth is my footstool.
Where is the house you will build for me?
     Where will my resting place be?
Has not my hand made all these things,
     and so they came into being?”
declares the Lord.

“These are the ones I look on with favor:
     those who are humble and contrite in spirit,
     and who tremble at my word.
But whoever sacrifices a bull
     is like one who kills a person,
and whoever offers a lamb
     is like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
whoever makes a grain offering
     is like one who presents pig’s blood,
and whoever burns memorial incense
     is like one who worships an idol.
They have chosen their own ways,
     and they delight in their abominations;
so I also will choose harsh treatment for them
     and will bring on them what they dread.
For when I called, no one answered,
     when I spoke, no one listened.
They did evil in my sight
     and chose what displeases me.”

When it is God who is the initiator and designer, things are a bit different. Moses supervised the building of a portable temple, and Solomon supervised the first attempt at a permanent temple, both following God's instructions, according to the Bible. In both cases, nobody claimed that God was really confined to those places; they were a way of providing the people (Hebrews and strangers alike) safe access to God. As God says to Solomon in 2 Chronicles 7:15 (context), "Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place."

The tabernacle and temple were built and maintained in the context of a near-total enmeshment of religion and state. There was a remnant of this arrangement in Jesus' time, but the Jewish authorities always had to keep an eye on the Roman occupiers, who mainly saw religious enthusiasm as a nuisance.

In our own time, a vision of church-state enmeshment is often associated with authoritarian states and demagogues. This danger of co-optation makes it especially important for us to keep open a space -- more than that, a hope and expectation -- that God may still come and knock us off our feet.

When that happens, we may be as shaken up as Peter, James, and John on the Transfiguration mountain, but instead of building monuments, let's encourage others to try going up the same mountain. In order to make that path and expectation ever more accessible, we may ask God's permission to build whatever facilities will help us keep the invitation alive, but without allowing those facilities to smother our vision or our capacity for surprise.

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A Russian case study of politics and sacred space: Is Christianity under attack?

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Is there a relationship between the compulsion to contain and institutionalize revelation (to build those booths), and the fear-and-militancy compromises we see in white American evangelicalism? I thought about this question as I listened to this podcast, which starts by interviewing Kristin Kobes Du Mez about her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, and continues with a good panel discussion about the book.

At the beginning of this year, Helena Cobban began her Project 500 Years. After her first fifty entries, she reviews what she's learned to date, and how she plans to continue. (At the bottom of the page, you can find the links to go to the previous year, Key Developments of 1571, or forward, Key Developments of 1572.)

In 2021 USA: Republican senators, Merrick Garland, and an alternative universe.

Aleksei Navalny's nationalist past -- and what it means for Amnesty International. Also: Ukrainian views of Navalny are a "very complicated cocktail."

Update on Jim Kovpak's Russia Without BS: see A Serious Message. Note his Facebook page.

Esther O'Reilley looks Ravi Zacharias and Rich Mullins, and the very different ways they coped with becoming Christian celebrities.

Beth Woolsey is moving into yoga positions "with ease."

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Four decades ago I was listening to Albert King play this song. Now it's Christone "Kingfish" Ingram's turn.

Where should we meet?

First Friends Meeting (Whitewater Monthly Meeting)-- the meetinghouse as of 1887. A major addition was constructed in 1912.

Meetinghouse as of about 1960. There was one last major addition, a new entrance with elevator, before the property was sold and the building demolished, in 1997. A completely new meetinghouse was built on Chester Blvd. During construction we were hosted by a Jewish congregation, Beth Boruk Temple. Photos from Lost Richmond, Morrisson-Reeves Library.

Robert Powers' article, "Reuse or Replace: What Becomes of Religious Structures When Congregations Move On?", begins with these words: "In late December, the City of Chicago issued an emergency demolition permit for the Anshe Kenesseth Israel building, a grandiose former synagogue in the city's downtrodden west side." The article brought back wistful memories of our old Quaker meetinghouse on East Main Street, Richmond, Indiana, USA, between 15th and 16th Streets--now site of CVS Pharmacy and Family Video stores.

The case of First Friends isn't a perfect match for the Powers article--it was a fatal defect in the church's structure which spelled the end for our building--but I was fascinated by the role of CVS in reusing a couple of other church properties. And, in the long term, we probably would have faced some of the same dilemmas.

I remember long discussions in business meetings concerning the Trustees' battles in maintaining and heating that huge old building when our congregation had shrunk from 1500 to 300 (and attendance far less than that) in a couple of generations. After yet another expensive re-roofing project was approved, one of our members said, "This is the last time I'm going to approve re-roofing this museum," or words to that effect.

When a city inspector told us that part of the roof structure had begun separating as a result of decay combined with winter stresses (and, if I remember correctly, a less than perfect joint between the original building and a large addition build early in the 20th century), we knew we were facing a crisis. First of all, the inspector (from a family associated with the meeting!) required that we no longer meet in the beautiful main meeting room. This room was the spiritual living room for generations--including our own kids. I have wonderful memories of our kids crawling around under the pews. For them, this awesome hall was their home, where they felt perfectly comfortable to be themselves. (Such an amazing sight to behold for me, the son of atheists, who had absolutely zero childhood church-related memories.) The room had been used for plenary gatherings of the Five Years Meeting, later called Friends United Meeting. Billy Sunday preached there in 1926. The Richmond Symphony Orchestra played concerts there. Life-changing ministry happened in that room, including the memorial meeting for my sister Ellen, nearly twenty years after her murder. In Russian terms, it was a "намоленное место"--a place made powerful by heartfelt prayer.

We sadly obeyed the city inspector and moved our worship meetings to the library. Much of the rest of the building could still be used for the time being, including its twenty or more small-group rooms, three kitchens, huge basement dining room, and the coffee-shop and food-pantry facilities.

At first we considered erecting a series of pillars and huge beams to support the ceiling while mostly preserving the architecture and interior. In the meantime, local preservationists caught wind of the danger our building was in, and pleaded with us to preserve the building. But when we saw the price tag for preservation, it was as much as building a new meetinghouse, if not more. We had to come to the realization that, if we were to keep our beloved building, most of our strength as a congregation would be sunk into maintenance and architectural preservation instead of spiritual growth and outreach. Our actual congregational life was incredibly portable--we could rent a movie theater or a school, for example--but we knew that if we sold the property, our building was doomed, and that prospect was just plain hard.

On balance, I think we were right to choose the path we chose: to build a new meetinghouse on land owned by the Yearly Meeting in the north end of Richmond, and to use volunteer labor from the meeting itself as much as possible in construction, to save cost. The architect for the new building, Jack Hodell, had worked earlier with Earlham College and Richmond's Morrisson-Reeves Library, and he created a design that was in harmony with the nearby Friends Fellowship Community building on the same property. The building itself is simple and its interior space adaptable. It would have been impossible to replace the huge Quaker cathedral on East Main, and in any case that sort of grandiosity would not have reflected who we were.

The more "portable" alternatives, such as renting a theater or breaking up into a number of house churches, also would not have reflected who we were at that time. In the early 1980's, several local Friends from all the existing Quaker meetings of Richmond, Indiana, actively talked about starting a new meeting along conservative (Ohio Yearly Meeting) lines, and that probably would have been a home-based congregation. Instead, we continued to stay with our own meeting, honoring the many ways they loved us even as we chafed under what sometimes seemed to us as excessive traditionalism and respectability. For all those seeming defects, when the crisis came, I believe we emerged stronger. That old building, now gone, still reflects part of our historic identity, but no longer controls our future.

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Last month, recent works by the dean of our institute's design faculty, Tatiana Vilde, were on display at the Lubr gallery in Elektrostal. She called the exhibition "Summer in Wintertime" (Зимою--лето: if someone has a better translation, let me know!) Some examples.



Another fascinating article related to architecture and preservation came out just yesterday: "Roosevelt University's Towering Ambition." The personal connection for me is this: through most of my childhood, my mother taught at Roosevelt. Thanks to her, I remember the amazing Auditorium Building where she taught. It sounds like this new building is a scary gamble--I hope it turns out well.

(My mother was a fierce atheist and had absolutely no patience for pacifism or for the civil rights and antiwar movements that touched university life during her years there. Interesting that her colleagues there included George Watson, who once told me that he remembered her. I wasn't brave enough to ask what he specifically remembered.)

And while I'm thinking about the nature of church (building, community, or institution?), here's a reflection on the recent U.S. Supreme Court Hosanna-Tabor decision. "Rethinking secularism: 'The Church'."

Alex Kane: Friend Helena Cobban and an attempt to discredit her.

Remembering William Hohri.

"The Heart and Soul of the late Etta James."

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