Book notes: A Sense of the Sacred

I'm about a quarter into R. Kevin Seasoltz's A Sense of the Sacred; Theological Foundations of Christian Architecture and Art. I'm a little surpised--happily. As the title suggests, it's a more scholarly book, and I was a bit intimidated. There are some pretty heady sentences like this one:

"The model takes the incarnational principle seriously; it seeks to draw out the implications of Christ's consubstantiality with human beings in terms of intersubjectivity and the personal encounter between human beings and Christ" (p. 44). Wow. I'm glad he takes time to explain and unpack statements like that!

Luckily, there is much that this historical look at art and architecture helps explain.

In positive terms, here's how he describes these generations' approach to growing in faith: "This strain in postmodern culture is characterized by humility, which acknowledges that the human grasp of truth is always partial. Both human persons and communities are fragile and finite; hence, their discourse about themselves and about God must be tentative. This does not mean that truth is relative; it means that the human grasp of any revelation about God is open to the possibility of further revelation, understanding, and clarification" (p. 31).

Taking the example of documents that came out of the Second Vatican Council, he writes, "The church is described in terms of a rich complex of images...It is the people of God, a holy communion, the body of Christ, and the sacrament of salvation. What is important for architectural purposes is that the emphasis has shifted from a pyramidal image of the church dominated by a clerical elite to an image of the church as an assembly" (p. 43).

He writes about how liturgy and liturgical art can come together, responding to the deep longings and searchings in postmodernism:
"Jesus died to the human tendency toward isolation, self-centeredness, and self-preoccupation. He inserted himself into the human community and entered deeply into the healing and corrective dimensions of human life. Through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, he empowers us to do the same" (p. 55). These connections between each assembly and God, and between each assembly and the community in need must be made explicitly and incarnated through their liturgy, their sacraments, their art and their architecture. "There is an essential link between the celebration of the liturgy and social justice and ethical behavior" (p. 59).

The struggle with liturgy and art, Seasoltz realizes, is that it often calls people to dig deeper and to reflect on more than the surface. "Living in a technological environment, people do not easily develop a contemplative disposition that enables them to interpret experience on deep levels and to look beneath the surface of events" (p. 59). It is the the church assembly's responsibility to provide the adequate time, space, words, gestures, silences, images, art and architecture to encourage and guide people to this reflection, for there we can find healing and the motivation for meaningful activities. We must teach people to be open to transformation: "They must be willing to enter into the symbols and to expect transformation to take place...Liturgical celebrations must be accompanied by a reflective or contemplative disposition and a life of personal prayer on the part of those who participate. The dawning of understanding and the disclosure of fresh meaning usually come gradually and often unpredictably to those who do involve themselves in the symbols and who spend time with them" (p. 61).