Ask the Author: Marie Clausén
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Marie Clausén
My love affair with old churches continues for the time being. While Sacred Architecture in a Secular Age: Anamnesis of Durham Cathedral uses the example of a well-known and much revered monument to explore the values and roles of sacred space in our time, I have a notion to make things more difficult for myself by widening the frame. After all, while the great cathedrals of Europe will probably remain standing and sanctified one way or another, the future may be significantly more precarious for smaller country churches with less of a claim to historical or art-historical distinction. I would like to make a study of the actual and potential province of country churches, and – to paraphrase Sir Lancelot, in earnest as much as in jest – since they have need of a knight-champion, then do I offer myself as such a champion!
Marie Clausén
I have always loved churches – the smell of burning candles, the oblique and lambent light, the ascetic beauty of stone floors and wooden pews, the swell of an organ transforming the space into an aquarium of sound, and the many serious faces of Mary and of her son nearing us to death and to grief, a theory in images from which we know that practice will ineluctably follow.
Like many others, I experienced a thrilling metaphysical awakening in adolescence and briefly counted myself a Christian of sorts. I had read the Bible cover to cover at thirteen, paid visits to an excommunicated Catholic priest, attended Methodist and Baptist services and, not being willing to take anything as writ, asked awkward questions wherever I went. Ultimately, the seeking that had led into Christianity also led out of it, the need for the particularity of denominational faith shed, but a sense of the numinous remaining.
Critically, my feeling for churches remained the same as it ever was. I struggled to understand this and was discomfited by what I perceived to be a trace of something inauthentic and superficial in myself: how could I persist in enjoying the atmosphere of churches after I had eschewed the belief that was the very raison d'être of those spaces? Had I perhaps all along just been attracted to the aesthetic dimensions of churches and liturgical rites? Or is there something else, even now, beyond the stupendous magnificence of Romanesque columns or the sublime chasms and scarps of Gothic naves that finds a correspondence to an essential but unknown and wordless part of me?
The impetus for this study arose out of a desire to wrangle with these questions, for my own sake certainly, but ultimately in an attempt to arrive at a proper reason for why, and how, we ought to take seriously the safeguarding of churches for people, wherever they might find themselves on the belief spectrum.
Like many others, I experienced a thrilling metaphysical awakening in adolescence and briefly counted myself a Christian of sorts. I had read the Bible cover to cover at thirteen, paid visits to an excommunicated Catholic priest, attended Methodist and Baptist services and, not being willing to take anything as writ, asked awkward questions wherever I went. Ultimately, the seeking that had led into Christianity also led out of it, the need for the particularity of denominational faith shed, but a sense of the numinous remaining.
Critically, my feeling for churches remained the same as it ever was. I struggled to understand this and was discomfited by what I perceived to be a trace of something inauthentic and superficial in myself: how could I persist in enjoying the atmosphere of churches after I had eschewed the belief that was the very raison d'être of those spaces? Had I perhaps all along just been attracted to the aesthetic dimensions of churches and liturgical rites? Or is there something else, even now, beyond the stupendous magnificence of Romanesque columns or the sublime chasms and scarps of Gothic naves that finds a correspondence to an essential but unknown and wordless part of me?
The impetus for this study arose out of a desire to wrangle with these questions, for my own sake certainly, but ultimately in an attempt to arrive at a proper reason for why, and how, we ought to take seriously the safeguarding of churches for people, wherever they might find themselves on the belief spectrum.
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