St. John's Chapel, 2001

They’ve torn up the lawn hard by the chapel. One week ago, between the rose windows of the old fieldstone church and the bleak façade of the dormitory stretched a beautiful greenspace that drew the scene together. Apparently water had been leaking into the chapel and staining its white walls.

Maybe the problem is poor construction; the church itself was put up in the late 1800s, practically yesterday compared to many of the houses and other buildings in this part of Cambridge, Massachusetts. So now, as I take the shortcut to work through this divinity school’s campus, I am confronted with a forlorn sight: the familiar statue of a penitent, hands clapped to the head in supplication, has been moved from its spot in a tree-enclosed enclave and is standing next to a power shovel and a temporary chain-link fence.

In place of the cropped green grass is hard-packed dirt, criss-crossed by scars from the treads of heavy machinery. Passing by this sight, I feel a strange twinge. The thought occurs to me: I hope they’re going to restore that space somehow. Before, the lawn seemed a natural extension of the chapel itself, as if the two were linked together; it was a joyful place that made me think of William Blake’s “ecchoing green” when I passed by. Now, even the church, a place to worship God, seems duller, more profane.

Why should that be? We live in an era of sterilized buildings and climate control. Our cars, parked in dry, warm garages, wait for us to climb in and open the door with one press of a button. We turn on the defroster and punch another button for the heated seats as we drive away. When we arrive at church, we drive under the carport to drop off our passengers so that they won’t get wet. We look for the closest possible parking space, turn off the ignition, and raise a golf umbrella with yet another flick of a button.

Once inside, perhaps the temperature is slightly too warm or too cool. Maybe the cushioned seats feel a little hard. We might be tempted to grumble about the slick tiles in the entryway that the no-slip rug didn’t cover.

We listen to the homily. State-of-the-art amplification is in place so that we don’t have to strain to hear. Not to worry if we miss a critical point: a projection system beams the sermon’s outline onto large screens descending from the sanctuary’s ceiling. A glossy bulletin advertises upcoming events, in case we missed the announcements.

We build churches that look like shopping malls and go to malls that function as secular churches. Our places of worship are “physical plants” that look a good deal like self-contained worlds surrounded by fences and gates. We can be “in the world but not of it” to our hearts’ content, we tell ourselves with satisfaction.

So if we have all this, what does one meager green lawn beside a leaky old chapel matter? I wonder this as I walk past the scarred earth, and then it hits me: I had felt the presence of God just as powerfully on a bright early summer morning, getting the cuffs of my pants wet with dew that reflected the sun, in that little space in the middle of a city, as I had sitting in chapel services inside the church.

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