Mass in a Warehouse

We’ve tried the church just down the street from our new house twice now. I don’t like it. The priest is great. I thought that the relics from the True Cross on the Feast of the Veneration of the Cross were an amazing thing to behold. I can’t get past the architecture.

I try, but it looks like an office building that someone has hung a few religious pictures in. Add in the lack of a crucifix (it’s a resurrection cross instead), and really ugly, poorly done modernist mosaic stations of the cross, and it feels cold and vast and not like a place intended for the worship of God.

I know that we can pray and praise and worship Him anywhere, and I truly believe that to be the case, but I find this particular building to be very distracting. It’s not a good worship space when you find yourself distracted by the ceiling and the clear glass windows.

Isn’t it funny that I don’t find a ceiling that’s covered in murals to be distracting or stained glass windows to cause my mind to wander, but the vast blankness of this church disconcerts me?

I read somewhere that a church should be the anteroom to Heaven. That’s what is missing from this office building of a church. There is no majesty to it.

As a human being, I am a sensual creature. (Meaning that I process information through my senses, get your mind out of the gutter.)That’s one of the reasons I am so in love with Catholicism. Mass in a Catholic church involves all the senses so that the whole of your being is involved in worshiping Him. Between incense and bells and chanting…it’s lovely. It would sound overwhelming, but it isn’t. It’s the most peaceful thing there is. If Mass truly is a preview of Heaven, then sign me up!

That’s what’s wrong with this church. It doesn’t feel like a preview of anything. My eyes have been left out of the sensual feast, and it leaves me feeling out of balance. God created us to worship him with all of ourselves. All includes the eyes. Give me majesty to drink in, and it puts my heart in the right place of awe in which to approach my Creator. Give me white walls and ordinary architecture and Sunday begins to feel no different from any other day. If the sanctuary is not a place apart from this world, but looks like my doctor’s office, then Mass on Sunday morning is not the summit of faith, it becomes simply another errand to run.