Sacred Space

I walked into the Chopin Theatre in Chicago's Wicker Park late on a Friday evening a few weeks ago, to see TUTA's production of Uncle Vanya. I was there with my sister Kristina, and quite unexpectedly and fortunately, my friend, Mark Lord, who just happened to be in town from Philadelphia. I don't think I had seen it live before, though I had read the play a few times, and of course Vanya on 42nd Street was a college favorite. It was performed in the basement space. The stage was covered in doors but no walls, the air was filled with music melancholy enough for Chekov, and the occasional subway train rushing by.

What makes a space sacred? What constitutes holy ground? How does it serve us, or allow us to better seek God, to consider some spaces hallowed and others just plain space?

I wrote in my entrance essay to seminary, that after feeling alienated from the cathedrals of Catholicism, I found God in the theatre. Sitting there between Mark and Kristina, with just a few other bodies sharing space nearby, experiencing together this funny and sad piece of theatre, the occasional brilliant moments of actors speaking old words with new life, I remembered just how much space matters.

The book of Exodus spends a ridiculous amount of time explaining just what would make a space holy for the God of Israel. If we take Exodus literally, God is gravely concerned with circumscribing the dimensions of a space that might be considered holy. By the time of David, God is less concerned with a space, and more concerned with having a good representative in God's King David. Of course, it isn't too long before David's son Solomon takes on his crazy-fabulous building project and creates the first version of the great temple of Jerusalem, which you could argue completely re-makes the entire identity of the Hebrew religion and the way the people see themselves and their relationship to their God.

The Sunday after I saw Uncle Vanya at the Chopin Theatre, I attended the worship service for the UU community, Micah's Porch held in the same space. It is hard to know what others saw in that space, if it could carry the same kind of borrowed meaning it held for me after seeing Vanya there just a couple nights before. But either way, I was reminded again, of just how much space matters. And not just because it shapes how people experience the service itself, but maybe more for how it communicates who is being invited, who might find this to be their place of worship, their place for community, for (as James Luther Adams suggested) practicing what it means to be human.

Spaces are like any part of the myths we use to access and experience Ultimacy - we must be careful not to confuse them with Ultimacy itself, and to be clear that their boundaries are constructed and performed for our benefit, and not at all real, as all the world is potentially and essentially holy. But we need these boundaries and performances of space, to help us recall who we are and are not, what we are made for, and what we are called to become.

One of the things that often confuses me - and I know I'm not alone on this - is just how predictable UU church spaces tend to be. Here we are, this free movement, affirming of an unbounded, expanding, alive faith, insistent on our congregational uniqueness and independence, creative expression and relentless discovery - and yet all our churches look alike. They look like each other, and they look like a good majority of other religious spaces. And although we are developing "alternative" worship spaces here and there, I'm still not sure why our "alternative" service isn't the main service.

People like to explain this to me in one of two similar ways...first, that our religious expression and theological inqury is so free, that we need the predictability of our space and our worship forms to ground us. It helps us recognize ourselves as "church." It offers us safety to explore ideas freely. Second, they tell me that because we have so many people who find us from other faith traditions, that this group prefers a more traditional church set-up for their worship experience. It makes them feel like they are going to "church," even when the ideas or experiences go beyond what they might have previously understood as acceptable for church life.

I don't know if these statements are true, but they have been repeated to me often. But even if they are true to some extent, they come with their own not insignficant issues, not the least of which is how these spaces that meet the needs of "come-outers" may fail to be inviting or worshipful for those who are raised Unitarian Universalist.

The Chopin Theatre, with all its chairs and stairways, with actors' props set alongside the walk-way, with its multiple spaces for eating and drinking, and with its posters of past and upcoming events, with all that comes with a Chicago theatre space - felt to me, as much like a church as any church I've ever attended. And yet, I wondered, if there were children in this church, would they find a place to be? How about differently abled individuals - would it have been accessible? And for all those who do not feel at home in a theatre - would they find this place just as alienating as a traditional church setting? Would they find God here?

Space does matter - as a point of access, as a component of the invitation we make to those with whom we hope to be in community. It matters experientially for the phenomenon of the thing - the sensory experience of it all, and it matters for what it signfies, what it communicates to us based on our culturally encoded shorthand - for its semiotics.

And space only matters inasmuch as it fails or affords us to allow us to find each other, to meet with each other, to experience that which is bigger than us, to know ourselves and each other, to practice being together, to practice and become fully human.