[Our friend Rene wrote a short reflection on our year in the parking garage, where we have gathered for worship during the plague season. We share it again as we prepare to regather in our sanctuary in the coming weeks. Our sense of belonging has been deepened in our temporary concrete home, and I am grateful for its shelter and the warmth of our affection nurtured within it. For more about our plans to move back inside, see the link on this page.]

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As a lover and sometimes teacher of literature, I am quite fond of the metaphor, language’s most precious gift to us. Apply an unexpected contrast between two seemingly unrelated things, and the intangible characteristics of one or both of them are put into powerful relief. By virtue of this simple equation, metaphor endlessly increases the dimensions of our understanding, and so, metaphor is endlessly thrilling! 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the sanctuary of First Baptist Pasadena, something else I love and a place I haven’t been inside for a year. No humble Baptist would ever compare it to the cathedrals of the world or even call it one, but as far as I’ve been able to discern, all who attend First Baptist hold what I believe is a God-approved amount of pride in it. In any sanctuary, temple, or cathedral, there are dozens of ways to talk about metaphor, and dozens of actual purposeful metaphors, but it seems to me that sanctuaries and cathedrals are themselves a sort of living metaphor. They are a “contrast” between two seemingly unrelated physical things – body and building – that results in an articulation of the intangible, of what we can embrace in our hearts but not hold in our hands: faith, hope, love – God himself. 

In our sanctuary on a Sunday, you can always identify first-time visitors. They are looking up! You can’t help it when entering a room with a high ceiling; you have to see how far it goes. This tendency has been acted upon by cathedral designers for a few millennia and thus in the simplest way they draw our eyes upwards to God, and then fill our gaze with beauty while it’s there. The art in a cathedral goes all the way to the top on every wall and ceiling, but it is especially expressed in the windows. When seen from the outside, these windows of stained glass are different shades of dark gray, and we perceive only traces of what makes them special. But, come inside the temple. Look up and see the light of the sun pouring through, making color shimmer, illuminating the air itself. Well, here’s another metaphor: one ought to appreciate people the same way one appreciates stained glass windows—from within! Lit up with the presence of God. 

And this can all happen to you even if you walk into to an empty cathedral, alone. Eventually those first-time visitors on Sunday also observe the people, the prayer, the worship, the teaching, the fellowship. And hopefully they feel welcomed, safe, and reverent.

So then, a thought experiment: If we were to design an “anti-sanctuary,” a physical space that did all the exact opposite things to our hearts, to our gaze, to our sense of wonder, what might it look like?

First things first: a low ceiling. A person of average height ought to be able to reach up and touch it, not that they’d want to, if it’s dirty and rough enough. Instead of lifted up we should feel squatted upon. The opposite of colorful is not white or black but gray, so make it gray. Make it all gray. Try to design it so that the quality of natural light we feel most is its harshness, and let it work to obscure those people up front whom we love.

Fellowship is closeness, so in our “anti-sanctuary” spread the pews out. No, wait—pews of warm wood worn smooth by the fellowship of all those who shared this space but went before us would be a bit too nice. Flimsy chairs of plastic mesh would be better, and naturally we can’t stick a hymnal in the back of them, to peruse for comfort when we’re feeling antsy about our place in the incredible legacy of faith we’re a part of. The space shouldn’t be embellished even one degree beyond what is absolutely necessary for its original function, so for good measure let us splotch the floor with oily, murky reminders that we don’t belong here in the first place, that this whole thing is just a giant shelf for machines. And we might as well put half the congregation inside those machines.

Finally, to really test ourselves, let us make it easily-invadable. Make it so that sounds crash in and people wander through without a thought that they’re in a space where they are supposed to quiet down and be reverent. 

The “anti-sanctuary” I am describing, of course, is the parking garage where we have held church services for months. The question I return to, week after week as I sit in my hymn-less chair of plastic mesh, is: why am I so happy? If the physical space is so nearly comically opposite of what it was, why do I still feel so good? 

The answer I return to time again does force me to contradict myself. Earlier I lumped “love” into my list of the intangible, un-physical elements we enjoy as we enter a great church building, and that makes sense to a certain point. However, lately my understanding of God’s love is being refined and transformed. In our small group we have been reading and studying N.T. Wright’s analysis of the first letter of John. I’ve heard these verses before, but N. T. Wright and my fellow small group members are revealing new dimensions to me. “Nobody has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is completed in us,” writes John in 4:12. About this Wright says, “The Christian faith grows directly out of, and must directly express, the belief that in Jesus the Messiah, the one true God has revealed himself to be—love incarnate.” Later, he writes, “…the witness must of course come not in word but in deed, as John says in 3:18. Our love must ‘come in the flesh,’ just as God’s love did.” 

This parking garage, which perhaps strips away even “God-approved” levels of pride, is filled with love in the flesh. Love is probably the most metaphor-ed thing in the world, but for once I’m imagining what it’s like to just let love be its simple, physical self. Love is a thing, and sits in this parking garage as surely as it does our sanctuary. Love in masks and cars, music and voices. And I can hold it in my hands, because I can see and touch the people in this garage. And I can leave the garage and see and touch the people I encounter everywhere else. (I won’t touch them, to be safe, but what matters is their presence!) I am aware of the fact that soaring religious temples had been built long before John wrote his letters, but I’m fairly confident that those early followers of the Way weren’t enjoying access to temples. I like to think of them in their homes with low ceilings and outside in open areas, feeling the breeze, blown away by the love they now understood had transformed the earth by being partly of the earth. Just as language “gave” us the gift of metaphor by which we are able to increase the dimensions of our understanding, so did God give his son – through which we are able to increase the dimensions of our loving. 

Shucks, I fear that I have written a thousand words in order to conclude that surely the Lord is in this place, which isn’t exactly an original idea. I don’t “like” church in the parking garage. But I love our church, which happens to be in a parking garage.