Look at this Sanctuary !!!!!

Vank Cathedral (Armenian Apostolic Church) in Esfahan, Iran

HT to The City and the World, where you can find more information.

Friday Freedom (and Daily Photo 25)

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Cleveland Heights

Idea here.  I'm taking the day off from the internet in all its guises, from the tv (well, except perhaps for one little late afternoon addiction I've developed), from the phone unless someone calls me who might have something urgent to convey (and there are only five such people), from any and all things electronic.

I'm so taking a media Sabbath Day that I'm writing this the day before and listening to tomorrow's Pray As You Go tonight.

The photo is from my walk a couple of mornings ago. I got so interested in the various arches and shadows of this church down the road that I ended up peering in an open window.  I can count the times I've been inside: once many years ago for the funeral of a 13-year-old girl, and once more recently for the funeral of an elderly lawyer and former mentor of mine, once to hear Martin Marty speak, and several times over a period of weeks for an evening course on Meister Eckhart.  It's nice to get a glimpse when the day is still and without distractions.

Like mine tomorrow!

Hope (Daily Photo 3)

This one, too, is from Church of the Saviour.

Thanks to the focused attentiveness brought on by my picture taking, I checked out the words over one of the side doors.  I don't think that I had any idea that there were any words there at all, which only goes to show how completely oblivious one can be ~  walking in and out of a door over a period of 25 years and having NO IDEA that its designers or builders wanted you to understand its significance in a particular way.

Which, today, is twofold.  First, the verse itself (and I had to go home and look  it up, because I'm not one of those people who knows those kinds of things), from Isaiah 56:7:

"My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people."

As a spiritual director and future pastor, I'm thinking that that's a very nice sense of mission for a church indeed.

And second:  As I was trying to work my way around the steps and railing, to take the picture the words that came into focus are those above, from the very center.  Now we in the PC(USA) today struggle to understand what we mean by "all."  Or we struggle to be in a church that doesn't mean the same thing by "all" that we do.

So when I saw those words over the very center of the door, I thought:

Hope.

Doors

Wow ~  thank you all for all the ideas!

Already I am looking more attentively and contemplatively.  I took this photo this morning en route home from the gym.  It's the front entryway to my previous church, Church of the Saviour (United Methodist).

A couple of years ago in my spiritual direction  class, we were sitting around talking one night about the burning bushes in our lives ~ the ways in which God has sought to capture our attention.  I was listening to a variety of comments and suddenly I realized ~ Church of the Saviour!  It's located on a main street in our city, in a residential area up from a retail section which hosts some of our favorite stores and restaurants, the theater where you can see all the films which never make it to the mainstream mall movies, and the bakery where we all hang out all the time. Our first house was a few blocks away, within walking distance (on Canterbury, Mumpastor), and I must have driven by Church of the Saviour hundreds of times before I suddenly announced to my husband one morning that I thought we should go to church.

My husband was the one who chose the church in question.  It's Methodist, which we had both been (he for real and me in the vaguest sort of way); it's designed on the model of a medieval French Cathedral (always helpful, from my point of view); and the services were televised on local Cable, so we could check it out before setting foot inside!  Having not been church attenders since high school, we were extremely leery of what we might be getting into more than a decade later.

We spent many happy years there, our children were all baptized there, and most of our closest friendships were formed there.  We've all taken various journeys since, but those doors definitely represent a burning bush in my life.

(Michelle suggested Doors as a subject.  Stratoz suggested Door, which is for another day.  I notice that there were a lot of suggestions of Hope!)

Church: Norway

I've been interested in church architecture and design for a long time. We've discussed it a bit at seminary; I wish it were the subject of an entire course. One of my (many, many) plans for this post-seminary summer is to begin work on a series of photos of churches.

In the meantime, in order to satisfy that particular urge, I thought I'd take a look at some churches which are, at least at present, outside my geographic range.


Image here.

From wikipedia:

<<A stave church is a medieval wooden church with a post and beam construction related to timber framing. The wall frames are filled with vertical planks. The load-bearing posts (stafr in Old Norse, stav in Norwegian) have lent their name to the building technique. Related church types are post churches and churches with palisade walls.All of the surviving stave churches except one are or were in Norway, but related church types were once common all over northwestern Europe.>>