In the documentary about the making of the film "The March of the Penguins," the two young filmmakers describe with reverence the moment when the small wild penguins they had been dutifully following reached their destination.
Almost speechless as they try to explain their feelings as they came upon the unexpected landscape of graceful and majestic ice cliffs they just say with elegant simplicity: "It was a cathedral."
Similarly, a couple of years ago on a family vacation to the caverns at Mount Shasta, our guide led us into what she told us was the most beautiful surprise explorers had found. As she recounted in hushed tones, miles inside the mountain they had suddenly come upon a space so grand and beautiful they named it "the cathedral room."
The gift that the imaginative naming of these two places as "cathedrals" gives us as a religious community is a key to understand our own cathedrals and to appreciate them.
I moved away from Los Angeles before our city's new cathedral was built, and on my return home this summer the Cathedral was one of the first places I visited. I truly did not know what to expect; my preferences tend more toward the type of Spanish Colonial architecture best exemplified in our exotically beautiful California Mission churches.
So I am glad I brought with me the metaphors of the graceful and translucent ice cliffs and the caverns to help me understand the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Its aesthetics --- the way its beauty speaks --- were somewhat new and foreign to me, yet even in this there is gift, because it stretches us.
What thinking of the cathedral metaphors disclosed to me was that a cathedral is about awe --- the jaw-dropping abundance that we feel in Yosemite Valley, where a particularly beautiful cluster of monoliths is also named Cathedral Rocks and Spires. We should feel small in a cathedral, becoming acutely aware that we are creatures who live in a universe not of our own making.
A cathedral should always include the natural world, pointing us toward Antarctica, Mount Shasta, Yosemite, as the paradigms of beauty the cathedral as a space of worship celebrates. Because the natural world, as Saint Francis reminded us, always points to and exuberantly praises its Author.
It's not easy to build a cathedral that honors Creation in the midst of an overly-developed urban landscape like Los Angeles, but the whole of our new cathedral somehow accomplishes it.
The entry plaza's floor with its rendition of the night sky on the date of its dedication succeeds in making us minuscule --- our earth a tiny speck in a beautifully crafted universe. Even more, the artfulness of the star chart celebrates humanity's precocious measurements and observations of the universe, a glimpse that we are Imago Dei, endowed with a spark of God's graciousness in our intellect and creativity. Our loving God wants to be discovered by us, and a cathedral along with awe should bring about this revelation of our relationship.
So our Cathedral delineates a space, a sanctuary within the city, where light softly filtered as through ice can lift us in a way our earliest theologians called "anagogically." The Cathedral space is not only an analogy for heaven as in "heaven must be like this"; rather, it puts us in heaven for an instant. An awe-filled space that reveals God's greatness in our smallness occasions prayer in its deepest sense, reassuring us with certainty that the stirrings of our heart toward God are real.
As the great writer C.S. Lewis explained, it is this joy mixed with longing that constitutes the moment when we feel most acutely the presence of God --- Antarctica, Mount Shasta, Yosemite, all of these can be churches, too.
In our Cathedral, the chapel dedicated to the Most Blessed Sacrament is at once cavern and ice cliffs and brings us to our knees. Here awe, revelation and joy are expressed and experienced. It is --- as our forebears in faith called it --- a Porta Caeli, a door to heaven.
Yet, a cathedral is unfinished --- the insight of theologian Alex Garcia-Rivera who accompanied me on my visit. A cathedral belongs to the people; its potential for awe, revelation and joy is unrealized without the human hearts it moves. The cavern, the ice cliffs, Yosemite, all praise God in their beauty, but it is human communities that have named these "cathedrals" and in doing so loved them.
Our Cathedral will become more and more a Cathedral in the measure that we worship together in its space. We must leave our footprints there to echo for others. Our small offerings left in front of Our Lady of Guadalupe or on a side altar, the memories of baptisms at the baptismal font, the proclamation of the Gospel from the sanctuary and in lives lived in service must resonate from every wall for future generations. For me this is the latent meaning of the intriguing tapestries. We are already part of this Cathedral's history.
Our Cathedral will be continually built by generations of believers who witness to Christ in their very lives, and if we imagine ourselves woven into the tapestries, we might imagine a better us, a better world. The Cathedral is....unfinished, as are we. Cecilia González-Andrieu teaches in the department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. |