When John the Revelator looked into Heaven, he saw liturgy.
He saw white-robed priests and worshipers ministering in the sanctuary. He saw candles and incense. He heard voices lifted in hymns of praise. A scroll was unrolled to read God’s Word. And the whole thing climaxed with the appearance on the altar of the Lamb, slain but living still, and the wedding feast celebrating the joining of heaven and earth. If that doesn’t sound familiar, you must never have been to Mass before.
Catholic liturgy is impossible to understand without this reference point. It’s about participating in the worship of Heaven and living right now the beginnings of a heavenly life. We come to Mass to offer that worship and to be filled by transforming grace. Then we leave Mass called and equipped to make the world more like the Kingdom of God.
This has a lot of implications, and one of the more tangible ones has to do with the way we build churches. Seems pretty relevant to us right now, so let’s explore that. If we really think that what happens here is a foretaste of Heaven breaking into the Earth, then that’s obviously the single most important fact about the place. I mean nothing else is really going to compete with that. What does that mean about how we build churches and practice our worship? We can look at it from three angles. The first is something we can call the sacramental encounter with grace. The second we might call the question of expensive worship. And the third is the transforming power of Beauty.
When I say “the sacramental encounter with grace,” I’m talking about a very Catholic way of relating to the world. It starts with the seven Sacraments, which are the most privileged moments of encounter with God. You could even think of them as the main pipelines of grace in the world, and the Sacraments come to us through the ‘stuff’ of our world. Water, oil, bread, wine. We really do believe that God uses the matter of nature to bring grace to our lives.
Now extend that thought. We believe that matter, stuff, can bear grace into our lives. Not everyone believes this. Some find it disturbing and wrong and vaguely pagan to think that stone and glass and paint and sound and smoke can bring actual grace. But we do believe it. It’s part of the Catholic way of experiencing the world. It’s what made Gerard Manley Hopkins write of a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” This isn’t something I have to explain to you. Just go out on a Spring morning and take a deep, deep breath and think “this is sacramental” and you’ll know exactly what it means.
This makes a profound difference when it’s time to build a church. In recent decades many churches have been designed by architects who are on the record saying it’s impossible for a building to communicate grace. So instead of a foretaste of heaven or a sacramental encounter, they become “worship spaces” and nothing more. Just as Le Corbusier famously described a house as “a machine for living in,” the church becomes simply a machine for worshiping in. That’s directly opposed to Catholic belief and damaging to Catholic piety. Twenty centuries of Catholic art say otherwise: stone and glass and paint and sound can bring grace. They can be sacramental.
They can be sacramental. But my second point asks, should they be? Probably everyone here has thought about this: I mean the question of whether we do well to spend our resources on such things. It comes up pretty constantly: “the Catholic Church spends money on cups and candlesticks and cathedrals instead of giving it to the poor. Jesus would never approve of that.” Let me first say that I’m very, very sympathetic to this point. In fact there’s a lot of truth behind it, but it goes wrong. You don’t have to take my word for it. We have a perfect parallel in the Gospel when our Lord is at table and a woman comes in with a jar of extraordinarily expensive ointment. She proceeds to dump it right on to Jesus’ feet. It isn’t hard to sympathize with the Apostle who was scandalized and said, “What an awful waste! That could have been sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor!” Judas said that. And Jesus rebuked him. She had done a beautiful thing, worth doing, good and right.
A lot of people invoke Francis of Assisi to argue against gold chalices and expensive vestments and the like. If they actually learned about him, they would discover that St. Francis of Assisi was very insistent that his friars use only the finest possible appointments for the Mass. The Saint who wanted nothing for himself wanted the best for the worship of Christ. Obviously this can be taken too far, and reasonable people can disagree about exactly what is appropriate and fitting. It also has to be done in that humble spirit. It can never be about pleasing ourselves or outdoing the next church or something base like that. We build churches and offer chalices and all the rest in exactly the same spirit as that beautiful woman pouring her ointment on the feet of Christ. The fact is, I have never heard an objection to this from a truly poor person. I have only ever heard it from people who have more entertainment than they need, more clothing and shoes than they need, more shelter than they need. How anyone who owns a television can keep a straight face while criticizing the Church for spending money on a chalice for the Blood of Christ is a question I will leave to the psychologists. I’ll never forget reading an article by a man who had spent most of his life in pretty deep poverty, and he felt terribly offended by the suggestion that beautiful things offered to God should be torn down and sold off for his benefit. He wrote, very movingly, that the church in his neighborhood was the one really beautiful thing in his life, and when he was at Mass it felt like a piece of heaven and don’t you dare, he said, don’t you dare try to take that away from the world in my name.
He said that because he understood perfectly our last point, which is about the transforming power of Beauty. Let me put this plainly and boldly: to be in the presence of beauty is to be in the presence of God. That’s another deeply Catholic way of looking at the world. Beautiful things aren’t just like candy for the eyes and ears. When I hear Sibelius’ 5th Symphony or Beethoven’s 9th, when the final cadence ends I don’t just feel like I’ve had a pleasurable experience. I feel like I’m a better person. Or at least I’ve been challenged to be a better person. That’s the power of Beauty, and though you might choose different examples, you know that power. A young parishioner told me Friday evening that she wanted a beautiful church. She has the beginnings of a great theologian. The more we experience true beauty, the more we train ourselves to desire it, the more we set our hearts upon it and let our hearts be broken by it, the more we will fall in love with God.
The purpose of this homily has not been to talk you into giving lots of money for our building fund, and I hope you haven’t taken it that way. But I read these words from John in Revelation, about the heavenly liturgy, and it seemed so important for us as people who are undertaking a church-building project. These aren’t fundraising talking points, they’re important Catholic principles. And while they’re especially relevant to our parish right now, they’re also relevant to every Catholic at every time. It really does change your life if you experience the world sacramentally, if you are prepared and even expect to find grace in the world around you and not just beyond it. We should all consider, I dare say we should all wrestle, with the relationship between the alms we give to the poor and the ointment we pour on Jesus. And in every undertaking, whatever simple thing you happen to be doing, whether it’s building a church or making dinner, don’t be afraid to seek beauty, to set your heart on it, to make it a goal of waking up every day and falling in love with God all over again.
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