Transformation of the Tacky

It had been the case that whenever I stepped inside a chapel, confronted by the ornateness and variety of imagery within its sanctuary, particularly in those high church contexts, what my eyes saw could only be described as tacky.

This was particularly true of those holy spaces that were actually used. To behold St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, or St. Peter’s Church in Capernaum—buildings that draw pilgrims from the world over yet are largely sterile and for tourists more than practitioners—is to behold feats of beauty; no one could argue otherwise. But when I entered the nave of a church preparing for adoration or sat next to a friend in the pews of a mainline congregation, what I experienced was less awe and more sensory overload. The picture I’ve included for this post does not do justice to the seeming disorderliness of these places of worship. There are images and engravings everywhere; stuff, presumably of symbolic or sacramental meaning, in every nook and cranny. The candles and tapestries, cups and bells, crosses and things I had never seen—these, intermixed with audio cords and small screens necessary in the 21st century, clashed and overwhelmed and gave a sense of imbalance. This is what my eyes saw.

Such a way of seeing is surely consequence of my own religious background. The Churches of Christ are among those traditions influenced by the great reformer Huldrych Zwingli, for whom purging worship spaces of all images and iconography was of central importance. He stripped churches of their decorations and left between their stone walls only Scripture and table. I, and those in similar traditions, inherit from Zwingli’s austere religion a minimalist taste.

Yet slowly, my vision was transformed to see these tacky altars and runners and icons as parts of a singular aesthetic that is the Church. Or, at least, a dominant branch of the Church. The pine pews and plain walls of low church traditions are of unmistakable value—but the decorations found within Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, or even Presbyterian and Methodist spaces seem to be uniquely representative of an ancient faith.

To see these spaces as such was something of a threshold event. I was visiting a friend at an Anglican Church to listen to a speaker they wanted me to hear. The speaker was fine, to be sure, but at some point my interest drifted from the homily to the trappings around me, and in a moment, I recognized them as lovely. Only minutes ago, my surroundings had been kitsch, and now I saw in them something handsome. To be clear, this was not a recognition of their symbolic import; I did not suddenly get the theological meaning behind each piece in the sanctuary. I already understood that intellectually. It was a purely aesthetic shift—seeing something as ugly, and then as beautiful, in the blink of an eye.

People experience these sort of shifts all the time, though maybe not as dramatically. It happens regularly in regards to art. Rare is the child that enjoys impressionist or cubist paintings; that comes (if at all) with a little life under your belt. I liked but wasn’t super impressed with The Green Knight (to be revisited next week) or Barton Fink when I first saw them, but now I include those movies among my favorites. And examples abound: food, architecture, literature, even people—all of these, we can see one day as ugly, and the next as beautiful.

What I’m hoping to describe is not merely the maturation that comes with time; rather, it is something like the appreciation that comes with understanding. Or, it is what we might call attunement. What this means is that we begin to see the merits of the thing before us—we begin to see what it (whatever it is) wants us to see in itself. When we begin to operate at its frequency, recognizing how it interacts with and responds to everything else in its space, we start to understand why it is the way it is and, thereby, appreciate its form. The thing before us affords us new insights and experiences, and when we are attuned, we begin to take hold of those affordances as we reinterpret them into our own lives and narrative.

I see in my attunement, under that vaulted ceiling, not simply a subjective experience but a transformation that bears fruit. For one, it endears a sense of ecumenicism. When I appreciate beauty in another’s meeting place, I more easily greet them as kindred. More than this, though, attunement opens up a constructive path. Attunement is note merely adopting the other thing—I do not look around the sanctuary and think, this is me. Instead, despite recognizing differences, I pull it in and incorporate it into what I already know and—from there—build something new.

There are many in my movement who have experienced similar attunement and now ask a common question: What does it mean for austere congregations, with roots in the rural South of the 19th century, to incorporate semblances of their ancient neighbors? Ought we to decorate our church buildings and auditoriums? Furthermore, is there a difference between beautifying our worship spaces and embracing the sacral imagery of the pre-modern Church? And these questions apply equally to the pomp of liturgical practices (which Zwingli also stripped from church services). To answer such questions well cannot be done out of ignorance or malice but requires a new way of seeing, an appreciation of the other. Attunement, therefore, is something we ought to invite, and hope for the possibility to see the world with new eyes.