Temples, churches and such

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Catedral de la Asunción de María Santísima -Guadalajara, Mexico


Eigenheim Mennonite Church, Rosthern

I'm currently leading an adult study group in a series of four lessons from I Kings concerning the building of Solomon's Temple. We're being reminded about the symbolism that's present in structures Jews and Christians have built over the centuries. Only some archaeological bits of Solomon's temple remian in existence, and no cathedral construction comparable to St. Peter's in Rome, St. Paul's in London or St. Isaac's in St. Petersburg is currently being contemplated, at least not to my knowledge. (An exception might be the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which remains unfinished although begun in 1882.)

How we construct worship sites says a great deal about the nature of our beliefs regarding whatever higher being we imagine. In the case of the temple of Solomon and the subsequent temple destroyed by the Romans, location was apparently relevant to sacredness; the “temple mount” in Jerusalem “usurped” by the Muslim Dome of the Rock is to this day a “holy” site to both Jewish and Muslim Abrahamic religions. So particular was the connection to site that as far back as Solomon's temple, parts of the structure were more sacred than others and a special dispensation was required to enter the “Holy of Holies,” for instance.

I suppose that regarding less-or-more more holy sites in the Christian Era (CE), an equivalency could be argued for Vatican City . . . but only if you belong to the Roman Catholic splinter of a fractured Christianity. It's probably a subject for another day, but what we consider to be sacred—whether that be a site, a relic, a book, a person, an event, a feeling—certainly has implications for how we live, how we relate to others, how we raise our children, how nations deal with each other. A sensitivity about trampling on the sacred is endemic to all religion, I would think, as is the sensitivity about honouring/dishonouring whatever deity we imagine.

St. Isaac's Cathedral was built on a swamp, so workmen had to wrestle over 200 enormous tree-trunk piles down into the soft earth. It took years to complete, so much so that in Finland, when people would talk about delayed project completions, they would quip that it had become a “St. Isaac's” project. The cathedral's dome was coated with gold through a process involving mercury and 60 workers died in that phase of the construction alone. Tsar Alexander I commissioned the cathedral and forced through the elaborate design against opposition and when I visited the magnificent edifice, I contemplated the motivations, the values, the hubris that went into the completion of what is now and since the Stalinist era, a museum.

Our study of the temple principles—if you can call them that—will hopefully help us to examine our own motivations, our own values, our own hubris when we consider where and how we will show our face to the public through our structures, how we will decide what honours faith and what is motivated by ego.

An interesting side note: St. Odilon's Roman Catholic Church in Rosthern worships in a converted grocery store.

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