Glasgow Churches

Editor's note: I left my camera card my computer because I was catching up on Paris posts and so I didn't take any pictures. Sorry. 
Editor's secondary note: I can't claim to have come up with some of my comments on the use of spaces in church architecture that come later in the post. I'd love to talk it over with you, citing heavily from Richard Kieckhefer's Theology in Stone.
Editor's final note: This is a long post. I'm sorry again. 

So the last time I came to Scotland I came with my youth choir. It's quite different when you're traveling in a large group- the potential for getting the wrong train or bus isn't as great, as you've got a coach to travel in, your meals are much more determined and you have a ready-made group of friends. It's very different from showing up at the train station and hoping your hostel is close enough to walk and sociable enough to make friends.

The wonderful thing about having been in a place already, though, is the potential of friends to meet you. My choir director from back home is friends with a Scottish Methodist pastor who has a circuit of four churches just outside of Glasgow and after a couple of emails, Liz and her husband met me outside my hostel on Sunday morning for a day of exploring the Methodist churches around Glasgow.

Now, I grew up in the Bible Belt of the United States. We had FCA in high school and most people had a youth group of some kind that they went to on Sundays or Wednesdays or the occasional Thursdays. I pretty much lived at my church in high school and it was a big change in college when I only had Sunday School, a small group and bell choir to go to. I'm used to a regular congregation of 200 or more filling the room I'm in on a Sunday morning and there's nothing unusual to me about not knowing every member of the congregation. In short, I'm used to big spaces and lots of people on a Sunday morning.

The church in Scotland isn't particularly like that. Across Europe I've been to several services in large cathedrals with full crowds, but on the whole, the services have been made of smaller congregations. Christianity is on the decline in the Western world and there's not really any getting around that. With that in mind, getting up to read the two lessons on a Sunday morning in front of less than twenty members of the congregation wasn't surprising, especially after having been warned. We were in a small sanctuary upstairs in the church, looking for all the world like a small village church placed on top of a meeting hall.

This is the thing that I've been missing most when visiting big churches- none of them seem to have fellowship halls or a church office in another building or rehearsal spaces around back or anything like that. My church campus back home has four or five buildings depending on how you count- there's the sanctuary and the attached children's building, the church office and education building, the youth building and the Family Life Center (fellowship hall). It's the meetings that occur, either on Sunday mornings for Sunday school or during the week for any number of small groups, committees, organizations or rehearsals that form the life of the church. The ceremony on Sunday is the knot that ties all the strings of our different focuses together.

So I climbed a set of stairs following behind the greeter at the church door and walked into the sanctuary, noting the layout of the church- three sections of fixed pews plus a balcony all facing the altar on a raised platform in the center front of the church, accompanied by a pulpit just off on stage left, a piano on stage right and a nice set of stairs up to the organ that dominated the wall behind the altar. In a cathedral, you're likely to see a huge altar piece behind the main altar after walking through the choir. It was a comfort to see an organ back there, almost marking the Wesley brothers' musical emphasis.

Liz had told the people we greeted just outside the sanctuary that I was here visiting and studying worship spaces and how they're used in liturgy. This has indeed been a focus of mine but not something I've talked about very much at all here. Let me explain.

The majority of the places I've seen have been longitudinal ceremonial churches- they're laid out either in a hall or in a cross and the focus of the church is the altar. The liturgical focus is communion- sermons have grown important over the years, but we're as expected or central as we see them today until the Middle Ages leading into the Renaissance. Mass is pretty much the same everywhere beginning with a procession Bible bearers, acolytes, crucifers and priests who all need to bring the holy accoutrements of a service into the prepared space. The congregation sits and watches and comes forward for communion at the end. All of the rest of the side altars, chapels and decorations, unless they're used in the procession, are there for devotional use. There hasn't been much need to talk over this use of the space- it's the same, with variations over time, that's been in place since Christians began using basilicas in Constantine;s time.

This church was arranged the same way, though without the side altars. Another difference is that the action of the service happened at the pulpit as opposed to the altar- Liz led prayers and started off hymns and preached from the pulpit. We didn't even have communion. Much of the time, a protestant service is going to be focused on the pulpit and the sermon. Even though we occupy ceremonial churches, we've adapted them to put a focus on the things we feel are important. Some honor tradition more than others but most reflect the changes that came about a couple hundred years ago.

But that's just the inside layout of the church. Most longitudinal churches are going to be on the ground floor of a building, because the space is so well suited for processions into the building. A few ceremonial steps up to the entrance to the sanctuary aren't that big of a deal, but the winding stair in this church sets the sanctuary apart from the more easily accessible fellowship hall. The sanctuary is an upper room now, and you go there purposefully, no chance of wandering in off the street and finding it. It's a different emphasis, an interesting combination of ceremony and fellowship that also presents challenges in accessibility. It makes you want to read into the history of the church and see the thought behind the design even as you sit through a Sunday in the life of the living church.

I loved reading the lessons and singing hymns and listening again to a service in my language with a sermon I could understand and think through. We're such people of words, we protestants. It's the lyrics that make our songs holy, not the tunes in particular. Liz had picked the hymn words but let the organist pick the tunes. After the service, the organist came over to chat and offered me an old red hymnal. Not to brag, but I've been told by multiple other people that Methodists have the best hymnal and, as a church choir mouse, I've loved my fair share of hymnals over time. I was surprised at the gift and I kept asking, "To have? I can keep it?" and Liz said, "It's funny the things she gets excited about," with a laugh.

A favorite pastime of mine is exploring churches. Given the connections to facilitate the opportunity, I would love to spend days wandering in and out of the maze of back halls I'm sure cathedrals have. Maybe I'll write a book and then I can go like Victor Hugo and familiarize myself with the twists and turns of the stairs of Notre Dame. Given the opportunity here, just outside of Glasgow, we found our way into the old sacristy down a back stair that led from the sanctuary to a hallway that led eventually to the fellowship hall. A small room at the back of the sanctuary served as the sacristy now and this room lay forgotten. On wall, though, was a framed letter from John Wesley himself. See, I'm a nerd. This means I'm given free reign to be utterly excited about subjects that might confuse other people. A letter from the founder of my favorite branch of Christianity? I love history.

We left Port Glasgow and headed over to Paisley, home of the fabric pattern. The streets are all named after things in the textiles industry- there's a Gauze Street and a Silk Street, etc. You figure I'd feel at home, growing up across the street from a clothing factory. There's an abbey in Paisley and the largest Baptist church in Europe, I believe. It's interesting to think about the heydey of the town and the kinds of churches built then- how exactly do the stars align to set prosperous times in Paisley with a rise in the Baptist interpretation of the faith?

But we came to Paisley to look at the Methodist hall that houses a congregation of 80, a fair sized congregation. The place looks like a theater from the street, a large building on a street corner without a peaked roof or steeple to mark it from the shops around it. The gated front door even reminded me a bit of a box office, though no ticket windows peered out from the walls. The morning's service, held in the fellowship hall on the first floor, had ended but a few people had come in to see the hall. We walked upstairs and I felt in my element again- after two months, give or take a week, of walking into churches with the express purpose of looking around, I was quite used to touring sacred spaces.

The Methodist Hall in Paisley is quite different from the other churches I've primarily studied, but not so different from the churches I've found myself worshiping in over the years. Instead of following in the traditions of Roman basilicas shaped into crosses that had formed church architecture for the longest time, designed for ceremonies and sacraments, the Methodist Hall is an auditorium, built for the speaking and hearing of sermons. The downstairs is full of theater seats facing a raised stage comprising of two side stages and a central platform jutting out just a bit with indentations. The pulpit used to stand there, when the hall was in use, again just in front of the organ console and pipes that dominated the wall behind it. A communion table could be brought out as well and probably placed on the lower level, underneath the pulpit. Upstairs the rest of the organ sat opposite the pulpit, surrounded by a balcony full of the same seats as below.

In a day and age of megachurches in America and huge Christian conferences meeting in arenas in Atlanta, it doesn't seem odd to me that people would choose to worship in a space like this. There's great acoustics and a choir could have a killer show in a place like this. Man, bring a gospel choir over here- it's a near perfect venue for that. There are these back stairs that lead from the chancel's upper levels to a little backstage place where the choir could get ready before walking in. I've missed choir lofts. But this place is designed for a performance. It's liturgically planned for the congregation to come in and sit and watch. The fellowship hall downstairs is planned for participation.

That's not to say that it has to be used like that. Yes, it's ideal for lectures and concerts- it would be a great space for a conference on any topic. There's not even a ton of religious symbolism in the room- the walls are white and the skylights have cherubs on them, but that's all. And churches today, everyone's so creative. A person with a good eye for the stage could really use this space- there's a lot of potential there. I mean, there are all sorts of considerations to take into effect when you've got a space like this- I've often wondered how much it costs to heat a cathedral (because goodness knows they're always cold unless you're in Spain), and, again, with the flight of stairs to contend with, there's a bit of an inconvenience in accessing the space, but there's always inconvenience when you're doing some spectacular.

And that's what was happening with big venues like this were built. Spectacular things. But all across Europe, Christian is a thing that people have been. And you can hear stories of spectacular things happening in, say, South America or Asia or Africa, but the places from which we've been sending missionaries, they're mostly over this whole church thing. And it's going to take quite a bit of work to convince them different. I mean, there's a thousand different ways to do the work, the future being oddly similar to the cavernous building in Paisley. It's difficult to know your way around, but the entire space, it's full of potential, you know?

Glasgow Cathedral

The cathedral in Glasgow is dedicated to St. Mungo who is said to have been buried there. Anybody else think of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries? Good.

Pictured: Not a magical hospital in London

It's actually a pretty well preserved medieval cathedral, something that tended to be torn down in Reformations and the rejection of Catholicism. I can never decide how interesting I find the history of the Protestant Reformation with all its different sects ending up allowing for the thousands of versions of Christianity we have today. I mean, if we had cards, I'd be a card carrying United Methodist, but that's mostly because I'm good at joining organizations and the United Methodist Church in the states is an organized monster indeed. But more on all of this later. The cathedral in Glasgow is a Presbyterian, Church of Scotland place. It was popular during the Reformation to de-roof churches but this medieval cathedral survived and, though desecrated during the Reformation, the people of Glasgow willing paid for its repair.

And so I walked around inside with some kind of appreciation. Sure, the outside was covered with scaffolding, but the inside preserved the quire (choir) screen,

The thing that looks like a wall. Yup, that's a screen.

 separating the open nave from the pewed choir, and even if the stained glass windows were new, they kept up with the traditions of the windows, one belonging to the guilds of Glasgow, another to a wealthy family, each eager to leave a mark on such an important holy place. Again, I enjoyed the English on the walls, from being able to understand that this list of names was a list of those killed in a war and this list of names was a list of honored bishops of the cathedral. I loved picking out Bible verses and stories I knew from the words in the windows and floors. I love that a prayer for a guided path encircled the column in the sacristy and that Jesus' injunction to care for the sick, hungry, thirsty and imprisoned carried the theme of the windows in that same space.






I walked down to the lower church to see the tomb of St. Mungo and caught the end of a tour of the cathedral, pointing out an older Gothic column preserved in its decoration

and a chapel with brilliantly white walls used for weddings. I left the cathedral as they were setting up for a wedding in the upstairs church, giving space for a new life to begin while I walked slowly around the lives that had been ended, reposing on a nearby hill.

The Necropolis in Glasgow is modeled after Pere Lachaise and is from a time when the fortunes of the British Empire smiled on Glasgow as the second most important city in Britain. Names that I don't know of rich people who died long ago and not so long ago adorned tombstone after tombstone. A high monument to John Knox and other reformers sat on top of the hill with the best view of the cathedral and Glasgow and I smiled as a little boy ran up to it and turned to ask his father if it was a king on top of the high pedestal.

Right around the corner from the cathedral is St. Mungo's Museum of Religious Life and Art. It's got plenty of good stuff in there from the five major religions and I spent a couple of hours reading every plaque and thinking over every exhibit. I watched the wedding party arrive and leave from a second story window, keeping my laughter to myself as a group of older German ladies stepped in front of the window and cooed at the small boy in a kilt I had been amused by an hour earlier.

All of this is swirling around in my head, all these bits of religion that I've encountered in one day. On the one hand, you have an extremely familiar form of church for me sitting right out there, a ceremonial church designed for sacraments, inspiration and words of authority. Then there's a graveyard, familiar in its unfamiliarity with a monument to men that I recognize briefly but realize I could not tell their story. And now, here I sit, among Buddhas, copies of the Qu'ran, dancing skeletons and Shiva as the Lord of the Dance. Plenty of people think that if you're a religious studies major, you're on your way to seminary and that you're focused on their religion and a history of their church.

On my right I have a building to remind me of why they think that and on my left I'm surrounded with proof to the contrary.

Glasgow

It's not a bad train ride from London to Glasgow. I took an early train because it was literally fifty pounds cheaper and oscillated between reading and staring out the window. Tiredness and excitement vied internally- I remembered loving Scotland the last time I was there but I hadn't slept well in the large dorms in Paris and London and so, though I stared out the windows with anticipation, it was difficult to bounce around as one is said to do when excited.

Glasgow Central train station makes my top three favorite train stations (you know you're backpacking around Europe when you have favorite train stations). I arrived before my check-in time, so I enjoyed some Starbucks internet and watched the pigeons harass passengers before walking down a couple of blocks and catching a glimpse of the Clyde River before walking into my hostel.

Here's a hint, if you're ever planning on doing something like this yourself: If you have the option and the funds, pick smaller hostels. Big hostels might have... well... well, actually, the only thing bigger hostels have that smaller hostels don't is an excess of floors. You can find a kitchen, laundry and free internet at smaller hostels and in smaller hostels, you actually get to meet people. In a big place it's easy to get lost among the crowds of school groups there on holiday or packs of friends traveling together with no need for another person. I hate being excluded like that.

Thus, I was quite happy when I found myself in a smaller room than requested- I was in a four bed room instead of a fourteen bed dorm. Through lucky happenstance (by the way, did you know that our word happy has its roots with the older English word hap, or by chance?) I was in a room with, among a rotating door of others, two girls my own age, one of whom was a musician (the aforementioned Bec Sandrige, who you should go give a listen to now) and the other her friend just visiting in Glasgow for a few days to support Bec at her shows.

It's crazy nice to come back to a room with people you like to be around. It's ridiculous the amount of empathy you develop over the course of trips like this- I understand much better the feeling a body can have when you don't want to go home but you don't have anywhere else to sleep. And so I was, again, delighted to have good roomies. I went out to see Bec perform at a venue one night and loved it, and spent the rest of their time in Glasgow enjoying chance meetings at the hostel even after they had to book another room.


Other than that, much of my time in Glasgow was spent walking over to the Starbucks with the internet and catching up on things. I'd go down to the river on less rainy days, watching people walk, bike, stroll, skate and sit on calm paths that bore witness to the night's excitements the next day. I went up to the cathedral and wandered through the Necropolis, walked through museums and shuffled through shops, spending every day other than my Sunday when I visited two churches just outside of Glasgow with a friend, in town filling the time between the early sunrise and the late sunset. I read.

It's amazing how caught up a person can get in the news and thoughts of the world around them. It does not do for me to have that much extra time on my hands, spotting potential TARDISes that turned out to be ice cream shops and musing on my trip long before it's over. I spent an afternoon in a bookshop, having become determined to buy Looking For Alaska, sitting and reading from my two new books. I had to put Looking For Alaska down. The talk of summer heat in Louisiana made me homesick. I had to put the internet down for a while too. Thinking over the headlines made me worldsick.

In the end, though, I was glad to head on to Edinburgh. Eventually, even the destinations become part of the journey and you start to look at the days on the calendar like hours on the train, carrying you along to a not-too-distant end. Oh, distant enough, I guess. But approaching.