Why You Should Go to Mass (Illustrated Edition!)

This is a useful graphic reminder about why we Catholics do and should attend mass weekly. The Holy Mass is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross, offered to God the Father, sanctified by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a sacrifice offered for four ends: to thank God for all that we have, to atone for our sins, to adore God's magnificent being, and to petition God for our various needs.

In recent times (and perhaps in distant times as well), we have sought to make the mass about us and our therapeutic needs. We have perhaps sought to use mass as a means for making us 'feel good' or as a means to 'rejuvenate our spirit.' These are noble side-effects of a mass prayed well, but they should not be the ends toward which we orient all of our thinking about our worship due to God.

Lake House Dreaming

 This is a little sketch idea for a lake house for a site in northern Michigan. The vacation home incorporates natural materials, a plan that is very open to the outdoors, and an aesthetic borrowed equally from the Prairie style, the Great Camps of the Adirondacks, and cruise liners. I think the blend of these influences, plus the desire to encompass a no-frills 'up north' experience, lends the house a dignified elegance that makes it feel timeless and at home in its natural surroundings.

The house is situated on a sloping site that leads down to a lake (to the left of the sketch). This topographic change manifests itself in the spatial organization of the house: the 'anchoring' three story portion of the house steps down to the airy great room that juts out into the site with the help of a sweeping wraparound porch protected from the elements by an elegantly cantilevered roof. The inside-outside fireplace at the terminus of the great room provides a secondary 'anchor' to the composition.

The great room and its porch is conceived as the focal point of the life of the house. The two-story room is rather luxurious in size and boasts a continuous linkages to the outside through many French doors and ribbon windows. A narrow band of clerestory windows light the space from above. The porch cantilevers out from the great room toward the lake, providing ample space for outdoor entertainment, even in rainy weather. Personally, I rather like sitting out on the porch at our cottage when it is raining.

The three-story (including the partially-exposed basement) volume 'up the hill' includes the kitchen, dining room, and a bedroom with an en suite on the main floor. The upper floor includes three more bedrooms and two baths. The basement is mainly storage.

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I personally love looking at and designing cottages and vacation homes. They are meant to be flexible, recreational places, so they are often less fussy than a traditional home. I particularly enjoy the Adirondack camps of the late 19th Century and the Shingle style East Coast 'cottages' of that same era. Michigan, since it is a bit of a cross-breed between the planar Great Plains and the woodsy Northeast, is in a unique position when it comes to architectural heritage and influence. Hence, with this design, I felt comfortable borrowing elements from Frank Lloyd Wrights' Prairie Houses as well as from more Eastern elements such as the styles mentioned above.

An opal-hearted country

The second stanza of Dorothea MacKellar's poetic tribute to her Australian homeland, My Country, is perhaps the best-known portion of the poem. From the first line we get the title of Bill Bryson's inimitable travelogue In a Sunburned Country (read it, even if you have never been or never plan to go to Australia). Anyways, the full second stanza goes like so:

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

I love the images provoked by her language! My favorite part of the poem, however, comes in the last stanza. I often joke that I get homesick for Australia, and I think these last few lines of My Country put into words that feeling I get on days like today, when all I can think about is that sunburned continent.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land-
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand-
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

At left is a photograph of the moon over the Pacific Ocean from the beach in Lennox Head. Gazing at the starts, the storm clouds, and the moon at night on the beach was one thing I loved very much.

Catholic Guilt

Catholics are accused of having too great a sense of guilt. Catholic comedians joke about it when referring to their upbringing. People mention it now and again as if its something to be cured of, like tuberculosis - an ailment of the personality. I find this curious.

I don't consider myself an overly guilt-ridden person, but I think it unwise to attempt to eliminate our sense of guilt. Guilt is the sting of sin reverberating back to self. It is the pointed desire for reconciliation piercing the conscience. Guilt calls out for forgiveness. It is a reminder to the soul that we are all intertwined, and that an injurious deed done to one will eventually reach back to the injurer. It is the thorn in our side that can only be plucked out by restoring charity in a relationship damaged by sin.

Sin, guilt, and forgiveness are not popular terms today. Perhaps they never were. But to deny the sky is blue does not make it lose its color, it just makes us appear as lunatics. Rather than focusing our mental and spiritual energies on avoiding guilt, downplaying sin, and stifling forgiveness, we should simply bear patiently the suffering that accompanies these things and allow them to transform our relationships for the better. I'm not saying it's easy or fun or nice, but it is necessary and good.

Do not deny that sin occurs - we are all sinners. Do not deny the prodding of guilt - we all crave reconciliation.

Someone should have a religion like this...

Liverpudlian Lutyens

In my estimation, one of the great tangential tragedies of the Second World War and the Great Depression it followed, was the end it put to good traditional design projects. Funds for projects became scarcer during the economic downturn, and after the European modernist architects had been dispersed in the postwar era, many noble project were simply discarded in favor of cheaper, more industrial, more modern, designs. The most monumental victim to this trend was Sir Edwin Lutyens' design for the Catholic cathedral of Liverpool.

Plans for a Cathedral in Liverpool date to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Catholic population swelled due to the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. Edward Welby Pugin, son of the preeminent Gothicist A.W.N. Pugin, was called on to design the structure. He finished only the Lady Chapel, which now serves as a parish church in its own right. Pugin's design was predictably Gothic, and would have more or less matched the style of the Anglican cathedral, which is quite fine in its own right.

As a visual aside, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish master of the Arts and Crafts Movement, submitted his own design to the Anglican design competition, which is not without its merits. It has a muscular, sculpted quality about it that one can find echoes of in the architecture of Bertram Goodhue in early Twentieth-Century America.

I digress. Back to Lutyens. Lutyens was commissioned in 1930 to design the Catholic cathedral on a site not more than a half mile from the then newly-constructed Neo-Gothic Anglican cathedral by Giles Gilbert Scott (shown in the first image). Lutyen's proposal was a massive, vaguely Byzantine structure that would have been the second-largest church in the world. The dome would've been the world's largest, outdoing St. Peter's by some thirty feet. Below are two images showing the proposed cathedral in its urban setting. In the first, you can clearly see the architectural challenge it would have been to Scott's Gothic Anglican cathedral.

Thankfully, Lutyens' original scale model, in wood, survived the War and is preserved to this day. The model more clearly shows the immense proportions of his grand design.

Impressive, no? Lutyens, in the tradition of the great cathedral-builders of old, most likely believed that this project would outlive him for several hundred years. Though it is very unlikely to be built as planned, the sheer grandeur and subtle artistry involved in such a mature design are likely to continue to inspire architects. I think the real power in Lutyens' design was his ability to be grand without being gaudy. There is a control and restraint in the design that I think is admirable.

Lest we end this post on a high note, we must continue with the telling of the story. Lutyens' design was scrapped after the war due to its astronomical costs (estimates of what it would take to build such a structure today typically run into the £990,000,000 range), and a third design competition was held. The winning built design for the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King is shown below.

I can hear the Anglicans laughing from here.