Sándor Márai
The following is patched together from two sources and is a story I was drawn to. The first source is from a Google biographical essay by Catherine LaCroix:
Sándor Márai was born on April 11, 1900 in Kassa, Slovakia, a city in what was then upper Hungary, part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. He was born to a distinguished bourgeois family. His father was a lawyer, and his mother came from a family of military officers, government officials, and more lawyers. He was the eldest of four children. “To me,” he wrote late in life, “being a bourgeois was never a matter of class status – I always believed it was a calling. In my view, the bourgeoisie was the best human phenomenon that modern Western culture produced, because it was the bourgeoisie who created modern Western culture.”
Márai had a private tutor until he was 10, and then attended a series of grammar schools. He ran away from home while at the first local one, so he was sent to a Catholic school in Budapest, where he spent only a year before moving to another school. His family was Catholic, but he lost his faith while still young. He looked to bourgeois humanism for principles that could order and direct his life. He read voraciously and took up writing at an early age, starting with poetry. He published his first story in a Hungarian newspaper when he was 14. He published his first collection of verse at 18. In 1919 he worked in the short–lived Bolshevik commune as a journalist and was — only briefly — a communist. When the Bolshevik administration lost power, his parents thought it best that he go abroad.
Márai went to Germany, where he began to study journalism at the University of Leipzig and philosophy at the universities of Frankfurt and Berlin. He contributed to magazines and newspapers during that time, and translated works of Kafka into Hungarian. He married a Jewish woman, Lola or Ilona Matzner, whom he had known in Kassa. In 1923, he and his wife moved to Paris, where he pursued further studies of philosophy. He earned his living by contributing to Hungarian-language publications. He reported on court cases, sports events, and holiday resorts. He also began to publish novels, novellas, short stories, plays and poetry.
In 1929 he and his wife returned to Hungary and settled near Budapest. By this time Márai was established as a writer, and he moved to a neighborhood that included many other prominent Hungarian writers of the time. His face adorned magazines; his newspaper columns were collected and sold in book form. He wrote as many as 46 books, 27 of them fiction. These included Embers, written in 1942. (Written, that is, at almost exactly the same time as the period in which it is set.) Other works included an autobiography, Confessions of a Middle Class Citizen, marked by searching self-analysis. He became one of Hungary’s most popular writers of the inter-war period, and his work appeared in several languages.
His heritage was important to him. He wrote that people “should remain faithful to those to whom their descent, upbringing and memories bind them,” adding that he felt anarchy to be “immoral.” His main inspiration came from nostalgia for the way of life destroyed in the upheaval after the First World War. One of his memoirs describes his Budapest apartment as filled with furniture passed down from the estates of his family and that of his wife. He mentions portraits of his father, grandfather, and other ancestors, and a library of 6,000 books. He describes the white–gloved maid who cleared the dishes after 11 Márai relatives dined together.
In 1939 Lola gave birth to a son, Kristof, who died after a few weeks, following an internal hemorrhage. It was a terrible loss. They were to bear no more children.
The Hungarian government was an ally of Germany during World War II. The Russians took over Budapest at the end of the war in 1945, during which process Russian bombing destroyed Márai ’s apartment. The Márai s fled to a nearby village, where they looked after a young boy who would become their adopted son. As the Communists solidified power in Hungary, Márai found that he could not live or publish in a regime so contrary to his own values. In 1948, he and his wife emigrated to Switzerland. They soon moved to Italy, where they spent four years.
While in Italy, his diary includes a 1949 entry that “the world has no need of Hungarian literature.” He added, “Back home, literature has disappeared … the country has collapsed; in its place all that is left is a communist Russian colony.” He concluded that he faced two forms of artistic suicide: tailoring his work for “foreign tastes,” or writing for non-existent Hungarian readers in a “deaf nothingness.” Indeed, back in Hungary, his name all but vanished, because the Communists did not publish his work; his books reappeared only after the collapse of Communist rule many years later.
In 1952, the Márais moved to New York City where, until he retired in 1967, Márai worked for Radio Free Europe. In 1979, he and his wife settled in San Diego to be near their adopted son. By then Márai had concluded that bourgeois civilization and bourgeois humanism had lost their luster and deteriorated into mass-market trash. Throughout his tenure in the United States, he continued to write, but all of his works were nostalgic period pieces, written in Hungarian for a Hungarian audience. They focused on faith and freedom of thought. Some works were translated into German or French, but none was published in English in Márai’s lifetime.
Márai lost his wife to cancer in 1986 and his adopted son to cancer as well in 1987 (at age 46). Both were devastating losses, for a man who by that time was wholly wrapped up in his family. Overseas, his brothers and sister also passed away. On February 21, 1989, after writing a note to his remaining family, Márai called the police. He told them that he was about to kill himself, and added where to find his apartment. He hung up and shot himself. According to news accounts, it was only while cleaning out his apartment after his death that his American daughter-in-law and three granddaughters discovered what a prolific and prominent author he had been.
Nine years later, in 1998, the Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso was flicking through a catalog of older works in Paris when he came across some Márai works in French translation. This was the beginning of the Márai renaissance in the West, including the Janeway translation of tonight’s book, Embers.
Anecdotes revealing Márai ’s personality are relatively sparse in the materials I reviewed. One story illustrates his apparent intense, unbending personality. When he heard that his estranged younger brother, a film director, had gone blind, he traveled across half the world to visit him. On arrival his brother exclaimed, “Sándor!” to which Márai replied only, “You can see?” then turned on his heels and left.
Another biographic insight concerns Márai’s devotion to his Hungarian heritage and language. The biographer suggests that the isolated Hungarian language contributes to the strength of Hungarian identity and friendships (as illustrated in Embers) and also to the ultimate loneliness of the exiled Márai’s life.
Catherine LaCroix, Sandor Marai A Biographical Essay
This next source is a reading selection from a WSJ book review, A Hungarian Novelist’s Literature of Fidelity by Eric Ormsby:
“Literary renown in English for Sándor Márai came to him in 2002 with the translation of “Embers.” “One spends a lifetime preparing for something,” he remarks in the book, “but when that something arrives, it is barely recognizable.”
One way Márai achieves a sense of depth in his novels is by treating time as strangely elastic. A single instant, half forgotten, will reveal its full import only decades afterward. His characters wait for years to grasp what one fleeting encounter portended. In “Embers,” the General has been waiting for 41 years to confront the friend who has betrayed him. In “Esther’s Inheritance,” Esther waits more than 30 years for the man who traded her inheritance for a worthless bauble, and in the end she surrenders her house and property to him.
“Portraits of a Marriage” (Knopf, 371 pages, $27.95), is the fifth Márai novel to be made available in English by Alfred A. Knopf since its success with “Embers” (it was followed by “Casanova in Bolzano,” “Rebels” and “Esther’s Inheritance). “Portraits” (1941) tells the story of the aristocratic Peter, who waits through 12 long years of a loveless marriage to take possession — or rather, be possessed by — Judit, the beautiful servant girl with whom he had a single exchange of words one Christmas Day. Márai shows how the past eludes us even more cunningly than the present, mutating as we examine it. Worse, remembrance is never unanimous; a shared past is a disputed past. Sometimes we believe we’ve uncovered some lost, almost irrecoverable moment and think it to be the moment that determined — or destroyed — our lives.
This is what Peter tells himself as he prepares to leave his wife, Ilona: “I understood that the decisive events of our lives are moments of stillness and silence, and that behind the visible, sensible events there lies another level, where something lazy is slumbering, a sleeping monster lodged under the sea or deep in the forest, in the heart of man, a dozy monster, some primeval creature, that rarely shifts itself, that yawns and stretches but rarely reaches for anything, and that this too is you, this monster, this otherness.”
This appears to be an impressive insight, the hard-won result of Peter’s dogged examination of conscience. As it turns out, it’s really much too easy. The monster he finds dozing within is actually a composite beast, made up not only of his own tenuous image of himself but the image of him created by his two overpowering and equally implacable wives. Ilona loves him too much; she wants to possess him completely, to winkle out “the secret of his soul.” Judit, by contrast, stands aloof, drawing him to her just as a magnet drags an iron filing irresistibly to itself.
As their successive monologues reveal, none of these three sees the others for what they are. To Peter, Judit is “terrifyingly beautiful,” but Judit, a poor peasant girl who grew up in “a ditch” that her family shared with field mice, is mesmerized by the glittering accoutrements of Peter’s affluent life. She marvels at his impeccably polished shoes in their dozens or at the special drawer designed for his many pairs of gloves. Each of these entangled characters comes through as thoroughly credible and desperately human. Though Márai’s eye is unsparing, he refrains from judgment. He’s less interested in presenting his characters’ spiraling self-deception — though he does that with uncanny insight — than in laying bare the terrible isolation that underlies all human relationships.
One of Márai’s contemporaries, the great Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, expressed the frightening sense of something dark and fathomless beneath our busy lives. In his poem “The Secret Country” (as translated by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan), he wrote:
Below earth and sea there is
a black lake,
motionless and mirror-sharp,
no one knows its chasms.
Such subterranean awareness gives Márai’s fiction its compelling force. Ilona or Peter or Judit are presented with all their quirks and little peculiarities. Their habits, their way of dressing, the patterns of their speech, their emotional swerves from profound boredom to blazing rage, are all meticulously rendered. The scenes of their disclosures — a café in Budapest, a sleazy bedroom in Paris — are conveyed in a few deft strokes. But the novel’s realism only serves to intensify the uneasy feeling that these three people are always teetering just on the brink of that black lake with its unknowable chasms.
Unlike Proust, for whom the recovery of the past, even in its humblest instants, epitomizes an involuntary, almost magical occurrence, Márai offers no madeleines cooked up by nostalgia for our delectation. Instead, he treats memory as a caustic; it strips away the cozy lies and half-truths, the well-buffed legends, we concoct about ourselves. Yet, surprisingly, such corrosive remembrance confers unexpected nobility on his characters; their fixation on the past stands finally revealed not as a pathological symptom but as a rare fidelity to something essential in themselves, to some small but hard-won truth about their obscure lives that even time recovered cannot eradicate.”
Eric Ormsby, A Hungarian Novelist’s Literature of Fidelity
I guess the fascination for me with Márai follows from his lifelong concern with memory. I am much more in the Proustian vision of memory as it flows more neatly with a Catholic vision. When Adam and Eve refuse to accept their condition and by their inordinate desire to “be like God, knowing good and evil” form the Christian account of original sin, it not only provides a “first cause” explanation of human perversity, it also identifies through a rich narrative the archetypal pattern for every sin.
How stories can convey truth in ways that elude ordinary rational thought is a question worthy of great wonder and meditation. But if stories in general have this power, myth is characterized by stories that deliver truth in the most refined and compact narrative form. There is therefore no tension between myth and truth. As John Paul II writes, “the term ‘myth’ does not designate a fabulous content, but merely an archaic way of expressing a deeper content.” The myth of the fall has this quality. Much great imaginative literature is merely an articulation and ramification of this myth, deepening our understanding of its meaning and of ourselves as well.
Nathan Schlueter, Reading The Theology Of The Body Into Wendell Berry’s Remembering
And so memory has become for me one of those hard wiring connections that the creature has with his creator that create the “twitch on the line” that Chesterton wrote about and was picked up by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited:
The Process By Which God Calls Us Back To The Center
The contemporary English novelist David Lodge was asked what makes his novels specifically Catholic. His response: they are all in different ways about God’s relentless pursuit of his errant children, This answer has always put me in mind of one of the greatest religious novels of the twentieth century, Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited.The second “book” of Brideshead bears the title “A Twitch upon the Thread,” and this image is derived from one of Chesterton’s Fr. Brown stories:
“I caught him [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
Waugh’s novel is about the process by which God calls his children back to the center — even those who have drifted to the furthest edge. As such, it is a particularly apt illustration of the first path of holiness…. The story opens as Captain Charles Ryder and his troop, in the course of their training exercises in the English countryside, come upon a stately manor house called “Brideshead.” This chance encounter triggers in Charles a flood of memories, for that place had for many years been at the center of his emotional life.
The novel unfolds as the account of Charles’s reminiscences of the people that moved through that house and of the events that swirled around it. What becomes plain in the course of the tale is that the central character is none of the human figures, but rather the mansion itself: indomitable, alluring, haunting Brideshead. St. Paultold the Corinthians that Christ is the head of his body the church and, shifting the metaphor, that Jesus is the bridegroom and the church the bride. Waugh combines these two Pauline images, making of Brideshead itself (the head of the bride) a powerful figure of both Christ and the church. The novel is, accordingly, the complex account of how people circle around Christ, now fascinated, now repelled, sometimes in his embrace, sometimes in flight from him. It is about the power of the center.
Fr. Robert Barron, The Strangest Way
This, for me, is the phenomena of memory and what makes Márai’s vision so transfixing for me is the almost 180 degree vision it offers to the Christian vision. In Márai we see the human person whose conception of God or the world has him blocked — hence the wait for years that his characters endure to grasp what one fleeting encounter portended. No Proustian or Brideshead memories here that are leading his characters (and us) to a deeper interpretive relation with the world. No, these are “corrosive remembrances,” where memory is a “caustic,” that “strips away the cozy lies and half-truths, the well-buffed legends, we concoct about ourselves.”
For Márai, who has “lost his faith” according to these literary historians, the world sits “on a black lake, motionless and mirror-sharp” and “no one knows its chasms.” Yet even despite himself and his nightmare visions, Márai creates an “unexpected nobility on his characters.” These are, after all, Maritain’s human persons – “their fixation on the past stands finally revealed not as a pathological symptom but as a rare fidelity to something essential in themselves, to some small but hard-won truth about their obscure lives that even time recovered cannot eradicate.”
Blessedly I hope that in his writing he was touched by our Lord, the power at the center, as he saw that “rare fidelity” and responded to that “twitch upon the thread.”
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.
Revelation 21:5-7
A Reading Selection from The Geometry of Love by Margaret Visser
May 18, 2011Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls)
Margaret Visser chose a little church in Rome, Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura, to write about. A church, after all, is the most intentionally meaningful structure in all of architecture and she helps us learn how to “read” its universal language of space. A great idea, a wonderful book.
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The word “remember” comes from the same Indo-European root as “mind.” And the English word “mind” is both a noun (“what is in the brain”) and a verb (“pay attention to,” “care”). When one has forgotten, to remember is to call back into the “attention span,” to recall. Attention is thought of here as having a span — an extension in space. Forgetting, on the other hand, is like dropping something off a plate, falling off an edge, not “getting” it, but having to do, instead, without it. Remembering is recapturing something that happened in the past; it is an encounter of now with then — a matter of time. Buildings — constructions in space — may last through time as this church has lasted. Such structures can cause us to remember. Their endurance, as well as their taking up space, may counter time and keep memory alive.
This particular church reminds us of Agnes, who was killed by having her throat cut almost — 1,700 years ago. But like any church, it recalls a great deal more. One of a church’s main purposes is to call to mind, to make people remember. To begin with, a church sets out to cause self-recollection. Every church does its best (some of them are good at this, others less so, but every church is trying) to help each person recall the mystical experience that he or she has known.
Everyone has had some such experience. There are moments in life when — to use the language of a building — the door swings open. The door shuts again, sooner rather than later. But we have seen, even if only through a crack, the light behind it. There has been a moment, for example, when every person realizes that one is oneself, and no one else. This is probably a very early memory, this taking a grip on one’s own absolutely unique identity, this irrevocable beginning.
I remember myself, walking along a narrow path in the Zambian bush. The grass was brown and stiff, more than waist-high. I was wearing a green-and-white-checked dress with buttons down the front. I was alone. I said aloud, stunned, “Tomorrow I’m going to be five! Tomorrow I’m going to be five!” I stopped still with amazement: fiveness was about to be mine! I had already had four. The whole world seemed to point to me in that instant. The world and I looked at each other. It was huge and I was me. I was filled with indescribable delight. I took another step, and the vision was gone. But it’s still there, even now, even when I am not recalling it.
This was a mystical experience. As such, one of its characteristics was that in it my mind embraced a vast contradiction: both terms of it at once. I was me and the world contained me, but I was not the world. I was a person, but I wasn’t “a person” — I was me. A mystical experience is before all else an experience, and beyond logic. It is concrete, and therefore unique. It is bigger than the person who experiences it; it is something one “enters.”
People have always, apparently in all cultures, conceptualized the world as participating in, or expressing, or actually being a tension between a series of opposites: big and small, high and low, same and different, hot and cold, one and many, male and female, and so on. Societies of people can have very idiosyncratic ideas about what is opposite to what: a culture can find squirrels “opposite” to water rats, oblongs “opposite” to squares, bronze vessels “the opposite” of clay ones. Anthropologists dedicate themselves to finding out what such classifications could mean; the answers they give us usually show how social arrangements are reflected outward upon the world, and determine human perceptions of how nature is ordered. One result of a mystical experience, therefore, can be a profound demystification.
For no sooner has a culture organized its system of contradictions than the mystics arise. They steadfastly, and often in the face of great danger, assure their fellow human beings that they are wrong: what appears to be a contradiction in terms is merely a convention, a point of view, a facon de parler, no matter how self-evident it may appear. These are people who believe and convince others that they have been lifted out of this world and have seen a greater truth: the opposites are, in fact, one. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus can say, “The way up and the way down are the same.” Or: “Step into the same river twice, and its waters will be different.”
Such mystic realizations (up and down are one, sameness and difference coincide) have to keep occurring, both for the sake of truth and for the necessity of realizing that neither our senses nor our thinking faculties have access to, or are capable of encompassing, everything. (“The last proceeding of reason,” wrote Pascal, “is to recognize that there is an infinity of things beyond it.”) For all the outrage and bafflement with which the pronouncements of the mystics are greeted, we remember their words; in time we learn to appreciate and value them. In our own day, physicists have been talking like mystics for some time: expressing physical reality, for example, as conflating space and time or declaring that waves and particles (lines and dots) can be perceived to be “the same.” The rest of us are only beginning to take in what they are saying.
From the point of view of the person experiencing them, privileged moments — those that allow us to see something not normally offered to our understanding — do not last. Regretfully, necessarily, we cannot remain in such an experience. We move on, into the practical, the sensible, the logical and provable, the mundane. But after one such glimpse of possibility, we henceforth know better. We know what it is to experience two or more incompatible, mutually exclusive categories as constituting in fact one whole. We have seen both sides of the coin, at one and the same time. An impossibility — but it has happened. We may bury this experience, deny it, explain it away — but at any moment something could trigger it, raise it up, recall it. Because it has happened, and cannot unhappen.
One of the consequences of having had a mystical experience is a sense of loss. If only it could have gone on and on, and never had to stop; if only the door would open again! One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in life is that we cannot bring about such an experience, any more than we can make it last. Sex can remind us of it because, like a mystical experience, sex is ecstatic, overwhelming, and delightful; it feels bigger than we are. Drugs can also make us feel as if we’re “there” again. So people pursue sex and drugs — experiences they can get, they can have. This other thing, this greater and unforgettable thing, this insight, is not anyone’s for the asking. It comes (it always comes, to everyone, at different times and in different ways), and there is no telling what it will be or when or where, let alone how. You can’t buy it or demand it or keep it. It is not a chemical reaction, and there is nothing automatic about it.
A mystical experience is something perceived, and it calls forth a response. But you are free to turn away from the vision, to behave as though it never happened; you are free not to respond. (This is something I have had to learn: when I was almost five there was no question of not responding.) The invitation cannot be made to anyone else but you — and not even to you at any moment in your life other than the one in which it is made. I shall never be five again, so no other mystical experience I have will ever again be that one. I shall never again wear that green-and-white-checked dress; it is very likely that the path through the brown grass has disappeared. What I have left is the enormous memory, and the fact that it has enlarged all of my experience ever since.
Now a church (or a temple or a synagogue or a mosque — any religious building) knows perfectly well that it cannot induce in anyone a mystical experience. What it does is acknowledge such experience as any of its visitors has had, as explicitly as it can. A church is a recognition, in stone and wood and brick, of spiritual awakenings. It nods, to each individual person. If the building has been created within a cultural and religious tradition, it constitutes a collective memory of spiritual insights, of thousands of mystical moments. A church reminds us of what we have known. And it tells us that the possibility of the door swinging open again remains.
The staircase takes you down into the catacombs and the main church.
The church, built at the level of the catacombs, is accessed via a dramatic wide marble staircase decorated with sculptures and inscriptions from the catacombs. It’s an exquisite church, built on a basilical plan, with three aisles; marble pillars in the nave support the seating for the nuns in a lovely frescoed gallery, below a richly-decorated, wooden ceiling. The apse is marble with a Byzantine-like mosaic in the upper part depicting Sant’Agnese receiving the crown of martyrdom from the hand of God.
Memory, in a church, is not only individual, but also collective: the building is a meeting house for a group of people who agree with each other in certain important respects. They come together to express solidarity, and they do this by participating in an intensely meaningful performance known as a rituals
The closest relative of a church is a theatre, where people also come together to witness a scripted performance. There is a stage in a church, and seats for the audience; in both theatre and church, people come in order to live together through a trajectory of the soul. They come to be led by the performance to achieve contact with transcendence, to experience delight or recognition, to understand something they never understood before, to feel relief, to stare in amazement, or to cry. They want something that shakes them up — or gives them peace. Successful drama, like a well-performed ritual, can provoke an experience of transcendence: through feeling, for example, two contradictory emotions at once. Aristotle spoke of catharsis — “purification” — as the aim of tragedy. Catharsis, he said, is achieved by undergoing two opposing movements of the soul — pity (feeling for, and therefore drawing close) and fear (longing to move out of the danger’s range) — at the same time.
In a theatre the audience is the receiver of a play, and essential to a play. At an ancient Greek drama the audience was indeed part of the spectacle. The form of the theatre, a huge horseshoe shape, ensured that this was so. The Greek theatres that survive today allow us to imagine what it must have been like, sitting in a vast crowd of fellow citizens with everyone spread out in full view, in broad daylight, fanning out to embrace the round dancing-floor below them. Actors say that an audience can draw out of them their best performances, just through the quality of its attention, its intentness.
A theatre is like a church – not the other way around. “Church” or “temple” is the main category, and “theatre” a division of it. Historically, drama grew out of religious performance (and never entirely left it) in a process wherein the play gradually separated itself from the crowd watching. The distance between watcher and watched is essential to theatrical experience. (“Theatre” comes from Greek theatron, a place for viewing.) People come together in a church, however, not to view but to take part. The word “church” comes from Greek kyriakon, “house of the Lord”; it is a place of encounter between people and God.
It is perfectly possible to be moved at a spiritual level at the theatre; one can open oneself and be brought to mystical insight, as Aristotle showed us, through attentive watching. (Such experiences, however, can occur anywhere, at any time — indeed, they seem to prefer arriving when we are least expecting them, at times and places we would be least inclined to call “appropriate.”) But a performance in a church is permitted to involve people to an extent that the theatre traditionally avoids.
People come to participate in it, to join in, and then allow the realization to enter them and work upon them. The whole point of the proceedings is to help them change the orientation of their souls, even though they are also confirming the foundation of their beliefs. They have come to meet, to make the ceremony, and to respond, at a level that may include but goes well beyond the aesthetic. But a church can go on “working” even when there is no performance and no crowd. A person can come into a silent church in order to respond to the building and its meaning. This can produce an experience as profoundly moving as that of attending a performance. The same thing cannot be said of visiting an empty theatre.
A church like Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls) vibrates with intentionality. It is meaningful — absolutely nothing in it is without significance. Even if something is inadvertently included that has no meaning to start with, a meaning for it will be found, inevitably. A church stands in total opposition to the narrowing and flattening of human experience, the deviation into the trivial that follow from antipathy towards meaning, and especially meaning held in common. Meaning is intentional: this building has been made in order to communicate with the people in it. A church is no place to practice aesthetic distance, to erase content and simply appreciate form. The building is trying to speak; not listening to what it has to say is a form of barbarous inattention, like admiring a musical instrument while caring nothing for music.
The building “refers” to things beyond itself, and it deliberately intends to be a setting where spiritual knowledge receives explicit recognition and focal attention. Sometimes the meanings are highly specific and complex; for the sake of clarity they may even be explained in inscriptions. Other meanings are more general: the nave is “like a ship” (which is what “nave” means), or windows let in light (a symbol of God). But these meanings also engage in intricate play among themselves, arouse further associations, and end up offering some of the most complex meanings of all. And always — silently, intently — the building points at once both to the individual’s own inner being and to the things commonly done in the company of other people in the church: the place where “the Word” is read, for example, and the site of baptism, or Christian initiation. The altar table is usually given centre stage, for at the heart of Christianity is a shared meal, together with everything meant by sharing a meal.
Contemplating all these meanings, even when you are alone in a church and there is no performance going on, is intended to help focus your mind and soul. You go into a church to exclude the extraneous, to get away from noise and distractions, to go back into yourself and take a good look at what is there. You go because you want to restore and enrich your relationship with God, by participating in a religious ceremony, by praying, or by just sitting alone in silence. All of the church’s “language” exists to help you do this, to get your mind humming and to make you receptive.
It is also supposed to help you keep in good spiritual shape. For one of the central tenets of Christianity is that belief and love and trust and insight, like mystical experience, are given to you. You can’t cause a gift such as belief or trust or love — whether felt or received — to be given, although a longing for what is called “grace” will surely be satisfied. Only, when the gift comes, you have to be ready. (Longing for it is part of being ready; Christians say even that to long is already to have received.) It is entirely possible to be so distracted that you don’t notice the gift at your doorstep, or to be in such poor shape spiritually that you do not recognize or cannot accept what is being offered. God comes “like a thief in the night.” (Notice that in this biblical simile, when God “breaks in” the person is thought of as like a house, a building.) All that a human being can do is be vigilant, notice what is happening, and then respond. A church is there to remind you, to teach you to pay attention, and to awaken the poetry in your soul. It gives you exercise in responding.
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