I grew up in a house that felt too small for the six of us who lived there. Three houses, actually, all three houses I grew up in felt too small for our family.
I say felt because I recognize now, knowing much more about the world and the how the vast majority of humans live, that it’s a white, middle class privilige to think any kind of critical thing about a building that kept us sheltered from the weather, safe from harm and in close proximity to a TV 24/7.
When I was a teenager I wandered around the city streets at night, looking into the lit rooms of what I imagined to be happier people because they lived in bigger houses, better houses. Houses with three floors, rooms full of books, big wooden staircases, history.
The last house our family lived in in that town was a brick ranch-style house, modern, ugly, utilitarian.
I imagine this conditioned me to think that having a big house meant something important. Or meant that you were important if you lived in one. Bigger = better. But better what, I’m not exactly sure.
By the time I returned to that hometown, much later in life, I knew more of the truth: that the people who lived in those big houses weren’t that happy after all. They were drinking a lot and having affairs and getting divorced. In a couple of cases, the people whose homes I admired eventually committed suicide. The kids who grew up in the big houses were as screwed up as us kids in the smaller houses in the modest neighborhoods.
Stuff, space, land and real estate, it seems, shelter none of us from life’s inevitable vagrancies.
Still, I moved into my adulthood thinking that I really, really wanted to live in a big house. That was my dream. And I did, twice, both times when I was married. I learned that it takes a ton of effort to keep a big house clean and that there is no direct correlation between size of house and size of happiness, number of rooms and depth of connection among the people who live in them.
In fact, there might actually be an inverse relationship. I was pretty miserable in both marriages during which I lived in large, beautiful buildings filled with lovely things and I’ve never been more content, now, mostly alone in my little house, in my minimalist life.
I’ve noticed that most of the people I know, at this stage of life (late 50’s) are eager to jettison all the crap they accumulated to fill all the space in their big houses, over the course of their life. And boy, if you think it’s a lot of work to gather and maintain stuff, wait until you want to get rid of it.
I’m still not sure why we associate the things we associate with large houses. Why do we consider them to be better? Why do we assign something positive or superior to the people who live in big houses? What is it about more space, more stuff, more rooms that we have come to equate it with superior? Why is that the goal, to have more? Why do we all gasp at the sight of a big house perched on top of a hill?
I remember the first time I saw a photo of architect John Pawson’s home in London. I had trouble breathing, I was so captivated by it.
There was something about all the nothing and the way it made me feel that told me something important about myself.
What I love is how all that empty space leaves room for possibility. It’s not all out there already telling you what will happen or what has to happen. Most kitchen counter tops are filled to the brim with appliances and their cords, most of which never get used.
Most of our lives are filled to the brim with visual clutter. It can be quite exhausting.
Like water we expand (with things) to fill the space we occupy.
Many years after I did my nighttime walks through the streets of the town where I grew up I was invited into one of the homes I had greatly admired. The air inside was stuffy, as if the windows hadn’t ever been open, and the entire place, every wall, every counter top and table top, every inch of every room, was filled with stuff, objects. It was suffocating and scary.
It was nothing like I had imagined it to be when I was young. It didn’t feel amazing or important or … better. It felt overwhelming. Exhausting.
It felt like nothing I would want, which I guess was both a revelation and a relief.
I know now, of course, that it’s not the size of the house but how you live, in general, and then how that plays out inside that matters. Some of the saddest people I’ve ever met lived in the biggest houses. And some of the most content live with very little.
The spaces we occupy have been on my mind a lot lately, in part because there is a move I might be making, back to bigger house living, and I’m feeling conflicted about that. And in part because I am really curious about the ways we organize and inhabit our sacred spaces. Because I am a pastor in a world that is rejecting religion more and more each year.
To be clear, I don’t consider myself a religious person. Partly because I don’t much believe in titles, descriptors or much of anything that puts us in a box. And partly because I’m not. I think ‘religion’ has done way more harm to humans than any of us will ever be able to counter-balance in our lifetime. I am a person who believes deeply in community and communal experiences and in the search. I love the quest for meaning. I happen to do those things in a sacred, church environment.
I’ve always loathed the way things are set-up in a church, though I never really thought that much about it until I was the one standing up front every Sunday.
Pews were never comfortable, always reflective of the icky feeling I had when I was a kid in church. The unsettled, what the heck is all this about? confusion I was subjected to each Sunday when we had to sit, stand, kneel, be quiet and listen for an hour or more. All the flow was in one direction—you were given information in church. The priest, in his fancy outfit, stood up front, up above all the rest of us sinners. And when he gave the homily he went even higher up, to some sort of elevated pulpit. The whole thing was very set apart, very us and them, and very, very oppressive.
But even in our simple, sweet little light-filled country church the pews are bolted to the floor, forcing everyone to sit facing one direction and the front where I stand is raised higher than the pews. I hate it. I hate being up above, as if I’m more important than anyone else there. I hate being set apart, as if I have more access to God than anyone else in the room. It’s simply not true. The architecture is telling a lie.
I’m hoping we can change all that, but it takes time and money, both of which are in short supply in a volunteer-driven modern-day church.
I don’t have any answers about any of this, I’m just wildly curious about the ways we set up and inhabit our spaces. I think about the houses of my youth, the ones my friends lived in. So many of them had rooms that were never used: the formal dining room, the guest bedroom. I think about the idea of a huge “master” bedrooms (where the f did that term come from?) and wonder, for what? You go in there, close your eyes and sleep, then you get up in the morning and leave. Do you really need a bedroom that’s much bigger than the bed you sleep in?
We are living at a time when everything is in flux. Maybe we’ve always lived this way, I don’t know, but it feels especially true now in the realm of religion and spirituality. People are seeking and also rejecting. No one is buying, without question, the religious lifestyle of their parents. Maybe in Utah, but nowhere else. People live online and in-person simultaneously. What does this mean for our so-called sacred spaces? What does this mean for the idea of home?
Why the heck are the pews bolted to the floor? Where did this idea come from?
Why is bigger better? What will we do with all these churches that are no longer filled with people on Sunday mornings? I drove through the Adirondacks recently and every single tiny town had an enormous church in the center in some state of decay. How depressing and telling on so many levels, these absolute dinosaurs rotting in the heart of a community.
How did Christianity, an idea predicated on simplicity, love, service and humility, become a system of vast wealth, real estate holdings, and enormous, elaborate buildings?
No answers, just wonderings right now.
But if you see me heading into the church late one night with an electric screw gun in my hand, you’ll know why. Clearing space for what’s possible, that’s all.
xomo
Excelllent tnoughtful aricle. My Church took our the pews and now we have chairs. Much more flexibility - but work to move, or remove, chairs ln order to really use the space.
Call me....I’ll bring my toolbox!