Have you been to a modern church or "worship space", and have you found it at best anodyne, two dimensional and somehow cheap, like a small but Ikea clean shopping mall? Perhaps you have, even worse, have you been to a modern church and found it offensively, actively ugly?
Sure you have, we all have, though I tend to avoid those places like the plague, which is hard in this part of the world. By way of aside, if you live in N Central Texas, everything's pretty much new, and that includes churches, which are built new style, and new style's not attractive, at best it's an ersatz simulacrum of the higher aesthetic of yesteryear.
"So what went wrong," I exclaim in disgusted wonder at varnished blonde pine, faux stained glass, shiny faked up wood plastic floors, water feature font and all the rest, "Two thousand years of Christian art and architecture reduced to this." At that point, I usually walk out of the grossly ugly HVAC temple and enjoy a cigarette, only to return again in repentant humility.
Please don't laugh, it's true, I do. Still, what went wrong, and it's a serious question, because something did go wrong, got broken, and within living memory for the most part. Why, dear friends, did this happen? Big question, with more than a few answers, but let's try and narrow it down.
Why? Because society went godless, rejecting in its promethean pride the classical forms of beauty, truth and goodness, such utter bourgeois oppression, and the Church, in a fit of apostasy, followed suit. Then, after the initial revolt, ugly became the new normal and there you have it.
To put it another way, Satan hates beauty which elevates the soul to God and salvation, and encouraged trite at best, bestial at worst ugliness in our architectural norms, which the Church embraced, being foolishly married to the disbelieving spirit of the age.
Net result? Ugly churches which no one wants to go to. And guess what, they aren't, attendance's in free fall. The same rule, not that we believe in "rule" here at the Compound, applies to liturgy, the public work of the worship of God.
Make that as banal, polyester and ugly as the building you're attempting to worship in and wonder, aghast, at your lack of converts to a Faith you don't believe in anyway. I say again, what went wrong? Apostasy on a grand scale.
This is discouraging to faithful Christians and others, no one wants to live in an ugly world, life's too short for such a thing. But perhaps people are starting to wake up, to reclaim their heritage and their faith, the Faith on which the West is founded. Stats, notoriously deceptive but there nonetheless, suggest younger people are doing just that.
And well done them, they're perhaps beginning to see through the miasma of the last fifty years or more. Part of this realization will involve a thoroughgoing rejection of atheistical Socliaism, to say nothing of the Liberal project of, ahem, radical personal autonomy, and an embrace of the Faith, without which Europe and by extension us, are nothing.
That's my call and I'm sticking to it, my monkey's in the ring. Do feel free to pit your ape against mine. Guinea take it, what?
Your Best Pal,
LSP
