Viewpoint
L.A. cathedral’s new sacred space and rituals can offer
healing
By LINDA EKSTROM and RICHARD
HECHT
More than two months ago the doors
of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels opened to the people of Los Angeles
and the world. From the earliest planning stages, more than five years ago,
there had been steady criticism of Cardinal Roger Mahony’s effort to build
the cathedral, designed by Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo. At first
it was the issue of money and archdiocesan priorities. Many feared that this
would shift support away from vital programs and people’s needs. In the
final year of construction, the sexual abuse scandal overwhelmed the church.
Criticism took on other dimensions. The cathedral began to look more and more
like a facade built up to conceal the dark secrets within the church.
In the weeks following the dedication of the cathedral, some of
those fears have seemingly materialized. Outreach programs and services on
college campuses have been cut. Other programs such as ministries to prisoners
and gay and lesbian Catholics were terminated. People lost their jobs. And at
the end of October the archdiocese announced the resignation of five of its top
administrative officers (NCR, Oct. 11).
All this makes the glory surrounding the cathedral’s opening
seem suspect. Many question the validity of such seeming extravagance in the
face of need. To them the cathedral represents materialism. When people are
hurting, how can a building comfort and heal?
But a cathedral is always more. It is sacred space that
resists being defined only by narrow concerns. For the people of Los Angeles,
this new cathedral is much more than just a building alongside the other new
and innovative architectural structures of a city re-creating itself. The
cathedral makes a claim to accessibility as a marker of hospitality. It invites
all to enter through the Shepherd’s Gate, there to be met by the
“Gateway Pool and Water Wall” created by Los Angeles-based artist
Lita Albuquerque. Peering into the water of the pool the viewer sees every
language spoken in the archdiocese inscribed in a marble disk. Water pours over
the words of Jesus: “I am the living waters.” This marks the entrance
to a sacred place where the sacred is the power and soul of the space.
One turns from the well to climb the stairs and cross the plaza
toward the monumental doors above which stands a new Virgin Mary created for
Los Angeles by the sculptor Robert Graham. This is a bold representation of the
Virgin, whose bare arms and bare feet at first sparked controversy among
certain members of the committee charged with selecting the cathedral’s
art projects. But the committee also saw something remarkably new in
Graham’s proposal and encouraged the sculptor to continue. Graham has
integrated the symbolism of the Virgin in multiple cultures and historical
periods into iconic sculptural forms in his bronze doors. His Virgin, standing
on the crescent moon and backlit by the afternoon sun, brilliantly draws on the
complex symbolism of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Art critic Christopher Knight said that the cathedral’s art
fell far short of the grandeur of Moneo’s architectural form. There is no
question that Moneo’s building has the same power of medieval cathedrals,
a power that is missing in many other sacred buildings in the modern world.
However, this cathedral’s power is a precise balance of abstract
realization and materialization of both a divine transcendence and a human
immanence.
As Moneo has captured God’s majesty in the building, the
tapestries of John Nava embody God-with-us. Nava renders the communion of the
saints as if they were people like us, near, familiar and of our time.
Nava’s saints are intimates. The tapestries hang from the walls in the
body of the cathedral and surround the people as they gather in the
architectural space. The profound quality of the tapestries is revealed in the
way they bring the transcendent grandeur of the architecture down to the lived
experience of the people. Catholic thought has always reasoned that the saints
bind together the human and the divine, the sacred and the profane, and the
eternal and the temporal. Saints are human and extra-human at one and the same
time. Their earthly existence is transformed into a devotion that continues to
mediate the seeming chasm between the human and the divine.
More than a hundred saints are represented in the tapestries.
Visitors remark about the sense of familiarity they feel as they look into the
faces of the saints. Most are canonized saints. There are a few nameless saints
scattered among them. In Nava’s representation of the communion of saints
what has been laid bare is that there are no divisions between people of the
past and the present, between official saints recognized by the church and
those individuals who have been elevated out of the people’s popular
devotion. Moneo’s building joins transcendence and immanence. Nava’s
tapestries join past, present and future.
The meanings and functions of sacred spaces in the world religions
are many. They are places where one’s history and identity are fused. They
are the places where people’s rituals re-create the foundational events
embedded in time and space. Rituals are also the experiences in which people
are renewed and sent forth into the world to re-create and make it whole.
Humans need rituals in sacred places. Rituals are the bridge between spaces and
people.
The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels is not just the touchstone
between heaven and earth executed by the extraordinary interplay of
architectural form and artwork. The cathedral is glorious and grand, but it is
also the epitome of the real, the church on the ground, moving through the
world. The architectural space frames the lived, ritual action of a people,
saves it and perfects it outside of time.
In one sense we see the cathedral as a building designed,
constructed, and controlled by an institutional elite. But sacred places in the
history of human experience resist such manipulation. They become larger than
the institutions that build them. Cathedrals resonate with the cosmos and the
divine. The new cathedral speaks to the religious hunger of our generation, to
find the divine mystery once again, to rekindle the human spirit in its quest
for something beyond the mundane. The cathedral speaks to the faithful and also
to the broken and to those hurt by the institution of the church.
When we leave the cathedral and return to the plaza we see the
proof. There amid the olive grove, a visitor might recognize stonework from
Jerusalem. Here is another fountain given anonymously by a Jewish family. A
Hebrew inscription from an early rabbinic treatise, Pirqe Avot, The
Sayings of the Fathers, has been carved into the stone. It is a saying of
Shimon the Just who may have been a contemporary of Jesus. Shimon stated that
the world stands upon divine teaching, ethical service and loving kindness. The
fountain and its Hebrew inscription are material witnesses to how far the
church has come in the past 50 years, from its famous Nostra Aetate
(“In Our Time”) of Vatican II to the extraordinary leadership of Pope
John Paul II around the church’s historical attitude toward the Jews. But
the presence of this inscription also reminds the church of what a cathedral
must stand for.
These Hebrew words begin to heal the wounds of past intolerance.
In the same way, a greater understanding of the cathedral as sacred space will
reveal its enormous importance to Catholic and non-Catholic alike, and how
sacred space and its ritual can heal and sustain all those who enter.
Linda Ekstrom is an artist who teaches at Santa Barbara
Community College and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and its
College of Creative Studies. Richard Hecht is professor of religious studies at
the university. Together they are completing a book titled Saved from
Matter, which explores the religious cultures of contemporary art.
National Catholic Reporter, November 29,
2002
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