For God's Sake

I spent last week in Barcelona with my family. On the flight home I thought about what I should write about, what was worth posting, worth trying to describe. It was a precious, happy time with my family, especially given how rarely the five of us are together. But the subject of this post is not my family, but rather a crazy, commanding structure that I explored with my family not long after we arrived.

The Sagrada Familia resembles a cathedral that has been microwaved (desciptor borrowed from a friend). Its rust-colored spires seem almost collapsed, like long balloons slowly deflating. A somewhat depressing description, but it's impossible to articulate it properly. Having seen Notre Dame de Paris and St. Paul's in London and various other cathedrals scattered around Europe, a glance at Sagrada Familia is rather violent. It is so different as to be somewhat otherworldly. And I suppose that is the point.


Gaudi (Sagrada's architect) was heavily influenced by nature and that's evident in the structure. Comparatively, Notre Dame de Paris feels un-natural, not-of-the-earth, elements that aid the feeling of transcendence anyone would experience walking through its nave. The light shines through Notre Dame and it feels like God himself is wrapping his fingers around the buttresses, lifting them heavenward.


Sagrada is different. There is transcendence to be sure. But it is rooted in Creation and crowned with Christ's story, told in the facades wrapping the exterior of the building. The interior columns' design was inspired by trees and Gaudi desired a vision of treetops, a celestial forest, within the walls of the church. The light shines in very specifically, as Gaudi felt that too much or too little light disturbed the spiritual experience. You need enough light to feel God's touch, not so much that you are blinded to what He shows you. Even being inside now, so stark and unfinished, the light pouring in seemed perfect and unobtrusive. It was that ideal level of shine and shimmer, with just enough shadow to calm.


Throughout the structure there are elements of Earth. Birds, lizards, turtles, water, leaves, flowers, vines, fruit. The other cathedrals I've visited (and loved) seemed distinctly unworldy, on purpose perhaps given the directive that we be in the world but not of the world. It's a powerful separation with such sacred places, sliding you safely into a place fit for worship, protected from the world's temptations and terrors. But I found the Sagrada's earth-inspired body to be significantly more powerful. To glorify God inspired by the Creation he gave seems so much more tangible and translatable. I can touch a tree, smell a flower, dig my fingers into dirt. I cannot build the Sagrada but I can sit at the foot of some trunk and look heavenward and sigh. The Sagrada, miraculously, creates a space of holiness and reverence while maintaining a connection to the dirt it covers.


Perhaps it moved me more because I love the Earth, too. Value it physically as well as spiritually. I do not take lightly God's order that we are the stewards of this planet, that it is a gift we are meant to treasure and cherish and use. Its resources are our own, but we are not meant to rape those resources with no eye toward the future. Our stewardship is meant to be intelligent. Prosperous but not ignorant of the ramifications of our actions. So a church reaching heavenward with tree-inspired columns, spires resting on carvings of turtles, it simply makes sense to me. We take so much of this planet for granted, assuming its resources are unremarkable or undiminishing. If we treasured those resources, that dirt, that water, that oil, that coal, that salt, those diamonds, those trees, those mountains, that river, those fisheries, with the same love and specificity gifted by the Creator, I imagine our relationship with the earth would be quite different today.


If we walked through the world the way we walk through the corridor of a cathedral, light pouring in and wrapping 'round tree trunks, we would, at the very least, hesitate before lifting the axe.