Why not steps?

The mark of older chancels was often steps.  The altar was raised, the pulpit was raised, and the whole chancel was raised.  Sometimes there were a plenty of steps.  Some might suggest that this was due to the need to be seen but I wonder if it wasn't something else.  The God who is wholly other is accessible by steps.  The steps are not simply architectural but theological.  We must ascend to Him or He must descend to us or we have no communion.  The ancient Church more likely reflected this truth in architectural terms than the present and future Church does.  

Especially medieval buildings reflect this symbolic language within the floor plan. Every aspect of the medieval structures we do admire seems to echo or communicate theological truths. The churches built of stone and wood reflected a worldview that understands reality itself in hierarchical terms, the God who is wholly other and who is inaccessible until and unless He reveals Himself to us and makes Himself available to us and their sanctuaries reflect this very literally.  Indeed, from at least to the 8th century, the church buildings were designed in vertical layers, lifting the ministers as well as the vision of the worshipers to the God on high.  The entire building was intentionally designed to be a vertical map of this theological reality, a very expression of medieval Christian cosmology.  

Our present views on the subject of the buildings in which we worship are probably not as organized but they also reflect our cosmology.  Though we are more likely to be concerned about ease of access, to be sure, we are also driven by the idea that we are on His plane -- an egalitarian idea of our relationship with the mighty and eternal God.   It is not by accident that modern day liturgical churches construct buildings in which the altar and pulpit are often on the very same plane as the folks in the pew.  This might be something we do in the name of disability and ease of access but it is more likely a reflection of our desire to bring God down to us on our terms -- something not so foreign to the problem of Eden.

Medieval Christians and those who went before them could have certainly placed the altar at the same level as the congregation -- it would have been much easier on the task of constructing the building. They could have arranged the “worship space” in the manner that we do today -- so the congregation surrounded the sanctuary on most or all sides and in which the chancel is center but not above us. The reality is that generation after generation followed the early lead until the present day.  We forget that what we are doing is so out of sync with our own Christian past.  They have continued to construct churches whose architectural plan was intent upon proclaiming ascent, descent, hierarchy, sacrifice and the kingship of Christ.  At least until the past 70 years or more when we made a break with our own history.

We need to relearn how to read that symbolic language the architectural plans hide.  We need to learn how to be more intent upon faithful structures which visually reflect the Biblical image of God and how He interacts with us.  Without this, our buildings will continue to be living rooms or warehouses which do not look like our theology or at least like the Biblical reality which is supposed to inform our theology.

The lighthouse does not move. . .

There are a thousand lighthouse jokes.  The one I am most familiar with has several incarnations.  The one my Canadian friend likes to tell me goes like this.  A US naval ship is warned by Canadians to alter its course.

CANADIANS: "Please divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision"

AMERICANS: "Recommend YOU divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision"

CANADIANS: "Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision"

AMERICANS: "This is the captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course"

CANADIANS: "No, I say again, you divert your course"

AMERICANS: "This is the Aircraft Carrier USS LINCOLN, the second largest ship in the United States Atlantic Fleet. We are accompanied with three Destroyers, three Cruisers and numerous support vessels. I DEMAND that you change your course 15 degrees north. I say again, that's one-five degrees north, or counter-measures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship"

CANADIANS: "This is a LIGHTHOUSE. Your call"

The lighthouse does not move.  Its value lies in that it does not move.  Its light is anchored to a certain point and this is what gives its light authority.  Everything else moves because of its light.  I wish we took this to heart in the Church.

There are so many voices calling for the Church to listen to the opinions of the people in and outside of the Church, so many who insist that the danger before us is becoming irrelevant by failing to listen to our people, and so many who believe that God's Word is more suggestion than permanent truth.  By and large liberal Christianity has given into to all of these.  The times are filled with the mantra of a listening Church in step with the times and with the needs/wants/desires of its people.  The end result is that these churches have no light left.  They shine with the borrowed light of those around them -- a fragile light that changes constantly and offers nothing of permanence much less transcendence. It is a mirror of our own light which has already failed us in Eden and left us broken and marked for death.

Even in the churches you would least likely expect to hear this call, it is there.  Rome calls it Synodality.  Some Lutherans call it trusting the wisdom of others to come to different conclusions than we have.  It is the deception of diversity which celebrates difference and promotes a unity unfounded on truth.  God has not left us with the tools to make our own light.  We are merely tenders of the lighthouse, HIS lighthouse.  We also shine with borrowed light but it is not our light.  It is always His.  His Word.  His truth.  His doctrine.  The world is that ship insisting the lighthouse has to move.  The lighthouse has no course.  It is anchored to that which is eternal.  This is the Church's value.  We are anchored to the eternal in the midst of a changing world filled with deception and falsehood.  This alone does not make the world bad but it does make it clear why the Church and the people within listen to a different voice than their heart, their minds, or the times.  I wonder what might have happened if we had spent the energy we used trying to reinvent ourselves and applied it to being God's light.  That is all past now.  We cannot go back to our past errors.  We must shine with the brightness of the one, true Light now, where we are, with all that we are.  God's light has not failed us but we have certainly failed God's light.  We have dimmed the Light of Christ in the hope that our own light would shine brighter.  It did not work then and it will not work in the future.  Our hope is to chart our position against God's light, to set our course by that light, and to follow that light from the changes and chances of this mortal life to our eternal safe port in heaven. 

Existential. . .

According to Study Finds:

A survey of 2,000 Americans found that one in three (32%) say they’re currently experiencing an existential crisis, with Gen Z leading all generations at 52%.

“Stressful” was the most common word Americans used to describe 2026 so far (35%), and respondents said they’ve already absorbed an average of two major unplanned life changes this year.

Financial pressure is a dominant driver across all age groups, with a separate survey finding that 87% of Americans believe the country is in an affordability crisis and half struggle to pay basic bills.

Despite widespread anxiety, 79% of Americans say they’re planning some kind of mid-year reset, and nearly a third say 2026 has gone better than expected.

One of the terrible burdens of our time is the so-called freedom to define yourself and to decide for yourself who you are, what you want, and how to live it out.  There was a time when I thought this is what I wanted.  In the end, I found it all exhausting.  It consumed my time and energy until I surrendered to what I had learned from my parents, what I had been taught in church, what I had seen in the lives of my family, and what the Scriptures said.  Thankfully, this journey of so-called self-discovery did not last very long.  The power of the examples around me and my upbringing within a community of faith laid calm on the sea of upset that this supposed liberty offered to me had created.  Sadly, there are too many people for whom the journey had no ending and has no end.  They are caught in the prison of this freedom and nothing else can exist before these basic questions are answered.  This is no gift.  It is a curse.

The sexual revolution said that sex was for everything but marriage and children.  It has become so embedded in our culture and in our lives that it is no longer questioned.  Even worse, the revolution expanded beyond the realm of desire and into a basic question of gender thrust upon the child as well as the adult.  You must figure out not only who turns you on but also who you are -- without DNA or sex organs to inform that decision.  Then you can use all the various forms to prevent the sexual union of man and woman from fulfilling its primary purpose and clean up the mess when it doesn't with a cheap and readily available morning after pill.

Work is no longer simply for the benefit of those in your care and to provide for yourself, it has become encumbered with the need to give us happiness more than purpose.  Our labors must provide us not simply with the needs of this body and life but interest, entertainment, and satisfaction.  Where my grandparents and parents knew almost instinctively who they were and what was the purpose of their lives, my grandchildren will have to treat these questions as a treasure map that might just take the majority of their lives to discover.  Work and money had meaning because of the people within your care -- those for whom you labored in unpleasant and unsatisfying tedium and those who benefited from the dollars the job provided.  But now it is more complicated.

Our children learn this stress too early, their childhoods robbed from by the intrusion of adult sized challenges and puzzles which must be solved before play.  Screens not only provide entertainment but shape the brain to love the search as much as the destination and inform in subtle ways the values and truths no longer built upon fact or faith but expedience.  Anxiety has been our gift to the children we should have insulated from these adult sized fears and questions.

The gift of faith is the gift of peace -- peace that comes first from the answer of who we are and why we are here, the order that shapes our lives not to curse us but to help us fulfill our purpose and find rest from the constant pressures of sex, money, work, entertainment, and happiness.  The rest that our Lord promises is not sleep but an end to the constant questions that prevent sleep and create turmoil where there was meant to be peace.  He gives us this peace, not as the world gives, but as only He can give.  Thanks be to God.  What we have to offer the world is not a restricted life which is bounded by unfair demands but the true and real freedom born of a death to end death and a life strong enough to live forever. 

Was he wrong?

Against the persistent chant of modernism which insists that the Church must change or die, there was a warning sent forth in 1933 by then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (and later Pope Pius XII) against that very thing-- change.  We have lived with the change and the mantra of change for so long we no longer question its veracity or relevance in an age unhinged from its own past.  On so many borders, the problem we have is not tradition but the lack thereof, a nod toward the present that refuses to listen to the past much less be ordered by it.  Yet the Cardinal was closer to the truth than the merchants of transformation whose empty promises of making all things new has only made us forget anything old.

"...the danger that threatens the Church is a divine warning against the suicide that the alteration of the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul, would represent."  That is what was set forth in a world soon to be changed right down to its core by rise of Nazism and the brutality of World War II.  Sadly, I do not guess many were listening.  "I hear around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject her ornaments, and make her remorseful for her historical past. Well, my dear friend, I am convinced that the Church of Peter must affirm her past, or else she will dig her own grave."  How we love innovation!  How we love the idea of dismantling the past and making the present disdainful of it until we are adrift from our moorings both on how we look at Scripture and how we live out its vision of the new life of worship and service.

We do not honor the past because it must be given deference but because we have no promise of being able to see the future but, through the lens of the past, we are able to see the missteps and errors of those felt it was a burden upon their time.  If we had paid a bit more attention, we might be in better shape today.  Since we have not, we have witnessed how we have made the Bible into a dead book of irrelevant facts instead of the living voice of God.  In the same vein, we have decided that relevance and contentment are more important gauges of fidelity than continuity so we reinvent things that we only yesterday invented while insisting the past is as important as myth and not much more.  Finally, we have given value to the idea that the unpredictability of what happens on Sunday morning is a better way to grow the Church and catechize the faithful than liturgy, lectionary, or life together.  Have you ever wondered about the irony of churches which insistently broke ranks with and condemned as false worship the lectionary and liturgy of the past only to become barometers of what is in style and what people will pay for in worship?

The way we have always done things seems to be laughable until you find yourself completely adrift from the anchor of yesterday and completely unequipped to handle the present, much less the future.  Tradition is hardly the ball and chain some presume it to be.  The dead have no veto power over the living because they are dead -- only because they were faithful!  “Tradition,” Jaroslav Pelikan famously said, “is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should  
add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name. The reformers of every age, whether political or religious or literary, have protested against the tyranny of the dead, and in doing so have called is also 
for innovation and insight in place of tradition.” (The Vindication of Tradition, 65).  We certainly offer to the future the best of that which is the present, but it is a gift that is yet untested and therefore not yet worthy of the same esteem as tradition, tested and tried and sifted until it has been deemed faithful from age to age.

Rome is even now reaping its own fruits of its own break with its past following Vatican II.  Lutheranism has found that its own liturgical change has brought an unwelcome diversity in which worship is all over the page.  Others are having their own issues with worship and doctrine -- including the idea that the form can be preserved (creed) but its own words emptied of meaning (e. g. Virgin birth).  It is as if both doctrinally and liturgically some have insisted of the Church, we must kill her to maker her live.

The great evil. . .

In the Pope's first encyclical, he has dismantled the just war theory Christianity has defended for a very long time.  In his mind, it is an antiquated concept no longer in step with the complex and changing reality of the present.  I am sure that the rest of Christianity will be happy to know that Leo has rendered his opinion on this -- except that his opinion counts for a bit more than an opinion.  To some, at least.

I am not at all sure that Rome, with its own history of brutal persecution of those whom it calls heretics or witches or whatever, is in a great position to speak of how justice, dialogue, mutual, sacrifice, and the affirmation of the human dignity of every person.  I guess that is a small thing -- since Leo is about to end the whole idea of war with the power of love.  Perhaps he could apply this locally to the situation in the Middle East, for example.   

As one wag put it, war is often a symptom of evil rather than the evil itself. The problem is that we tend to treat war as the problem in the same way we assign the problem of violence to guns.  Of course they are related but not perhaps in the way some presume.  The evil that set man against man happened long before there were nations and armies.  The first death of Eden happened before a military industrial complex or drug cartels or adultery or a lot of things.  In case the pope forgot.  War is the result of what lives in the heart of man from the departure from Eden to the present.  It may not be politically correct to say that but every Christian theologian worth his salt surely knows the truth of it all.  Or should.  Even Leo has to admit that today, “the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life.”  That

He also addresses artificial intelligence.  It should not be served but serve us.  That makes me feel better.  Magnifica Humanitas is about the much larger transformation of human life in our time -- even bigger than war, it would seem.  It is about technology, work, education, truth, communication, political power, economic inequality, war, transhumanism, and the temptation to treat the human person as data, material, or an instrument.  On this we both agree:  AI needs to be governed and not simply regulated.  But it is probably a little late for that statement to make much of a difference.  The world is already in the camp of fear that if the good guys do not develop AI, the bad guys will so every one must take it over and make it work for their cause.  Amid Leo's warning is this odd statement:  "The artificial imitation of positive human communication—words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love—can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful.” Exactly how he does not say.

For Leo, safeguarding human dignity is the criterion for judging what is good and what is not -- even in the sphere of technological development and artificial intelligence.  He is rightly concerned about the risk of moral irresponsibility in the use of artificial intelligence as well he should.  But what remains to be seen is how a dismal record of human violence and war will give way to reason and the power of love when it comes to the implementation of artificial intelligence.  I guess he has more hope than I do.  He apologizes for slavery as if it were his or Christianity's to apologize for and then fails to admit that Silicon Valley is headed full speed while any calls to consider the impact of it all are not even a distraction for the powers that rule AI.  In the end it would be wise to admit that the improvement of the human condition is not exactly the reason for a Savior who suffered and died and rose again.  The redemption of humanity, not the same as its improvement, seems to be God's higher concern.  Leo should know that as well.  Christian thinkers should weigh in on the morality of this technology, to be sure, but our primary concern ought to remain the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen for sinners but not quite for semi-sentient silicon chips.