Churches
◊ Today it is Sunday and many many many Americans are going to church. Not me, obviously.
I have been to at least a handful of churches and cathedrals in Europe. I have been in an ancient Swiss chapel with thick, solid, windowless walls in the Romanesque style. The God of that place seemed like he lived in a stone burrow, like a very large and very important rabbit.
I have been to Westminster Abbey where the door sills are shaped like old yokes and the floor tiles are cupped in the middle, worn smooth and concave by centuries and centuries of feet. That God was much older than the one back home. I imagine him sitting in a tall-backed chair and dozing during the early evening, lulled to sleep by a thousand years of tradition and the long-gone Benedictine monks singing vespers.
I've been to Notre Dame a couple of times, seen the rose window, climbed the towers and seen famous gargoyles leering at me from just a couple feet away. That place looks like God puked up a vast, echoing pile of light and color and intricate carvings. You have to feel reverent when you're in Notre Dame. There's no choice; you're being hammered over the head repeatedly with many, many, many psychological tricks meant to make you feel small and cringing in God's towering and light-filled house. That God? Sober and serious, maybe, but with a bit of flash.
Suburban, post-WWII American churches try to cop a little of that; when they have room, they're heavy on the stained glass and sweeping ceiling lines, to camouflage the fact that they are essentially giant lecture halls. But from the outside, they're absurd. They look like rocket ships, or squat little bread rolls, or smoky old piano bars with rock-wall exteriors. They look like ships. They look like dares. And they always, always have either a slim, simple cross sticking up out of the steeple, or a big neon sign.
Those churches look like Elvis.