Good camera work, great subject material. . .

I happened to run across this link to a spectacular set of photos from Peter Li whose work capturing the sacred spaces of England and other lands is simply amazing.  You can look at it here although there may be other websites to showcase his gift and the wonderful churches he photographs.  The subject material of the camera is itself amazing space.  Beauty is certainly not an end in and of itself for Christians but why on earth would beauty not be an ally and component of faithful Christian worship?

If there is a cause for beauty, is not that cause the Gospel of Jesus Christ?  At one time the Church was not simply the place for art and beauty but its patron and cause.  I fear that age has escaped us.  It is hard to justify spending money on beauty when construction budgets exceed plans and dollars are short and the urgent need for missions ever present in each spending decision.  We seem to have forgotten that we ought to be building not for a moment but for a long span of time in which the faithful will be gathered into that space, nurtured there in Word and Sacrament, and children raised up into the faith.  We seem to have forgotten that the Church is not simply another place where beauty lives but the place where an exclusive beauty lives -- the beauty of that which serves the Word in the same way music does.  The Word can have several servants and we need not choose.  The glory of song and instrument along with the glory of art and beauty (even in ceremony!) raise us up from ourselves to behold in eye what the ear hears.

While it might be nice to be able to build a space from the ground up, there is no more urgent cause than to make the structures we have serviceable to the liturgy and a gift to the eye while the people gather around the Word and Table of the Lord.  It can be done.  It is being done -- though not often enough.  We have a gift to give the world and Christ has entrusted that gift to us to preach and teach and also to present in visual form.  Let us raise the eye to God, give testimony to the voice of the Gospel in the beauty of the place where that Gospel has called us, where the Spirit works to enlighten and sanctify us, and where we receive the gifts that nowhere else can be found.