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The door. Joseph Campbell once remarked that anything is possible on the other side of the door to a sacred space. Within the hallowed hall is the celebration of success and good news. There one also anticipates an encounter with the holy, where illness, loneliness, hunger, and desperation are replaced by health, companionship, sustenance, and hope. Thus, the doors into a worship center bear a tremendous responsibility. They cannot look or feel like dull and monotonous shopping center doors. Although very different, both Lorenzo Ghiberti's fifteenth century north doors to the Baptistry in Florence and Robert Graham's twenty-first century doors to the Cathedral in Los Angeles are touchstones helping visitors connect with the biblical and cultural roots of their faith and hope in God. In a different manner, the main door to the mosque in the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City is a remarkable passageway filled with light—showing the way. These sacred portals enhance the religious experience, and should not be overlooked in the design of newer places of worship. Sacred Spaces as ResonatorsSometimes certain architectural styles, extraordinary interiors, unusual ritual furnishings, or magnificent works of art can characterize a sacred space. James Ingo Freed, the design architect for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C., said he wanted the Museum to act as a resonator of the holocaust. It would be a place, in his mind, that would, in a sense, "play back" the horror of the shoah. I have often thought that this is what places of worship are suppose to do—play back the myths, the stories, of a particular religious tradition. In this way the place energizes an individual's deep-seated memory in order to reinforce and affirm that person's experiences. The place then verifies spiritual convictions, so that when things go wrong it says back to you that you are okay, and that what you have believed before will get you through this time of trouble. In fact you know you are in a sacred space when it mysteriously puts you in touch with the event memorialized, even though you may have had no first hand personal experience of that event. Once I took my teenage niece and her friend to the Vietnam Memorial. I saw how emotional they became as they traced their fingers over the etched names "remembering" victims they never knew. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | Contents |
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