I read a very interesting little book this past year that reflects upon sacred space. It was written by a lay Roman Catholic fellow named Joseph Pieper, and offers much to be reflected upon when considering the notion of sacred space. At one point he says why he goes to church and it struck me as quite similar to my own reasons these days.

"I attend Church, not because of all the talking and preaching but because something happens there." - Joseph Pieper, In Search of the Sacred, 125

Something happens in church. That is the first really important point to be understood here. I find this to be an extremely Barthian notion, but it could just as easily come through the Catholic theology of Balthasar. Preaching and liturgy are incidental to this event (Ereignis) as God gets involved in our lives together. This is the heart of what it means to gather in Jesus's name, or as Jesus says in Matthew 18.20, "For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."

Jesus's statement turns most people's notion of church on its head. Church isn't a building, place or institution. At it's heart, church is the event which occurs when people gather anywhere and at any time in Jesus's name. People don't show up to church. Rather, church is what happens when Jesus shows up.

Pieper goes on however, to make a second and crucial justification for his interest in what happens at church. Namely, that all practices are relative to the primal event of Jesus's birth, i.e. the incarnation. If the incarnation is in question, then there can be no further discussion much less hope for any other events taking place.

"First and foremost, and so as not to start out on the wrong track, one has to understand this about the central Christian liturgy: it is characterized by being derivative, subordinated, and secondary. What takes place in it is essentially an echo, a continuation of something other. More to the point, in a very precise sense (to be elaborated further on) it makes present and actulaizes anew an event of the distant past, an event usually summed up in the theological concept of "Incarnation." This means that if this original event, an event that is first and primary not only in time but also in essence, is not accepted as truly having taken place, then any genuine grasping of what "happens" in the Church's liturgy, be it through mental acceptance or an active participation, becomes impossible."  - Joseph Pieper, In Search of the Sacred, 125-26

Pieper's confidence is not in his church as an institution with its buildings and political economic power, much less the beauty of its liturgy. Rather, he recognizes that his confidence is first, foremost and always in the incarnation of God's arrival in the humanity of Jesus.

Christians sometimes demand that their church building, practices and/or denominational structure be the best church, the pure church, or the only true church. If we follow Pieper's logic through, there can be a plurality of churches insofar as they all arise from the one incarnation.

There is one God, one Lord, one Christ, but he arrives in a plurality of practices and places.This is where Pieper is most helpful for all Christian's thinking about ecclesiology today. In one of the better examples of the breadth of Pieper's ecclesial vision he says,

Whether the congregation sees itself as parochia  (paroikia), an assembly of "strangers on earth," or as citizens of the promised Kingdom, in either case it separates itself from the ordinary and everyday proceedings of secular society. And regardless of the place where the liturgy is celebrated - in a suburban makeshift chapel; on the dance floor in a mission village; in a cathedral whose precious adornments and stained glass windows symbolize the heavenly Jerusalem; or in a concentration camp, with the living wall of bodies creating for a brief moment an intimate space barely shielding from the intrusion of their torturers - one thing is common to all these places: they are set apart, no less by their simplicity than by their splendor and magnificence, from the structure of everyday existence, from its numbing misery as well as from its deceptive complacency and ease. - Joseph Pieper, In Search of the Sacred, 30-31

There is no more beautiful and profound vision of the church in my mind as of late, than Pieper's circle of living bodies in a concentration camp. In the heart of one of the most inhumane, evil and degradingly segregated places on earth, people gather in Jesus's name. Jesus arrives at the heart of darkness and brings light, hope, and redemption. This is church.

Given my own writing on the shift from concentration camps to the highly surveillanced nature of our new urban Disneylands, I can think of no better place to gather in Jesus's name than in the heart of a city center. There, amidst all the invisible boundaries and forms of social exclusion people can gather in Jesus's name becoming the living walls of a church open to all.

However, it is important to question the way Pieper's separates the sacred off from the secular. Personally, it is here that I must part company with him and challenge his notion of sacred space to some degree. Sacred space, it seems to me, must not be about separation, but rather always about redemption. 

The difference between a sacred-secular divide, and a redemption of the secular should not be overlooked. When people gather in Jesus's name, they are transformed, but not in a way that takes them away from everyday existence. Christian worship is not to be confused with an opiate. In this sense it is important how we talk about Jesus's humanity.  Jesus is not a supra-human being, he is a fully human being. As such, Pieper's notion of the sacred we discussed above does not have to separate people from their secular existence. Rather, it might return them to an existence of hope and possibility which empowers them to live fully. As Jesus puts it, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." - John 10.10