February 09, 2004

» Cathedrals are "airports for God"

And I knew all at once what cathedrals were and were supposed to be, in the minds of their original architects: nothing less than airports for God to land at.

Cathedrals are airports. Like airports, there was at least one in every major city or population center. They were great civic works, huge undertakings of fundraising, resource-management, engineering. Their aisles, landing strips picked out not in high-intensity blue but in flickering candlelight. I don't want to take the metaphor too far, make it too crushingly literal, but I think now of cathedrals (and mosques, temples, shrines, iglesias and storefront full-gospel churches in the high press of their services) as nodes of a numinous travel network perpendicular to ordinary space and time. In the proper frame of reference, to enter them is to cross a threshold and be taken somewhere else, just as surely as I do when I board a jetliner. That's what I mean by "sacred."