A Modern Sense of the Sacred

Not long ago, a construction worker approached Cardinal Roger M. Mahony at Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral with a fervent plea. Would the clergyman offer a prayer for his son, who was battling a life-threatening illness?

The cardinal immediately placed his hands on the man’s shoulders, right there amid the dusty scaffolding that enshrouds the colossal downtown work-in-progress. When they’d finished, the laborer thanked Mahony and told him, “The cathedral is already working.”

Msgr. Kevin Kostelnik smiles as he relates the anecdote to a visitor at the cathedral construction site one recent morning. “Now there,” says Kostelnik, the cathedral’s pastor, “is a definition of sacred space.”

Or, at any rate, one definition. To the spiritual mind and the inquiring soul, sacred space today can be found almost anywhere: in a ring of stone monoliths in southern England or an Inca ruin high in the Andes. In the stillness of the Sedona desert at dawn or the artificial glow of Dodger Stadium at dusk.

Sacred space is forever redefining itself. And just as spiritual self-help books have become a TV chat-show staple, and Gregorian chants now serve as tasteful sonic decor in trendy restaurants, discussions about sacred space no longer are confined to the clergy and the shamans.

Sacred space also is becoming more secularized and pluralistic. As British author Roger Housden wrote in his 1998 philosophical travelogue “Sacred Journeys in a Modern World” (Simon & Schuster), religion doesn’t “hold a monopoly anymore on what is sacred: We are all finding out for ourselves.” In short, you don’t necessarily need stained-glass windows to get the right spiritual feng shui.

Few people are more cognizant of that evolution than the design team behind Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral, the adobe-colored Modernist temple rising rapidly above the Hollywood Freeway. For the engineers, architects and designers assigned to the project, under the cardinal’s leadership, the primary goal is to faithfully execute the nuts and bolts of Madrid-based chief architect Jose Rafael Moneo’s master plan.

But an equally essential aim is creating sacred space--those collective attributes that imbue a site or a structure with feelings of reverence, transcendence and a deeper understanding of the spiritual quest at hand.

It’s a challenging task. While Moneo’s design is clearly informed by his Roman Catholic upbringing, Our Lady of the Angels will bear little resemblance to a traditional European-style cathedral. There’ll be no stained-glass windows, no flying buttresses, no gargoyles. Iconography will be minimal and symbolism more universal than culturally specific.

The new cathedral will include such familiar elements as a bronze crucifix and tapestries depicting Christian saints. It also will allude to mission architecture and to Our Lady of the Angels’ earthquake-shattered predecessor, St. Vibiana’s Cathedral.

Yet its overall design distills rather than replicates traditional Roman Catholic architectural symbolism. Some design-team members acknowledge they’re unsure how Angelenos will respond to timeless ideals of sacredness wrapped up in this resolutely 21st century building.

“Frankly, a lot of Catholic people are going to say, ‘This doesn’t look Catholic,’ ” says the Rev. Richard Vosko, an authority on designing sacred spaces and a liturgical art consultant to the Los Angeles Archdiocese. “This cathedral is of its own time, of its own liturgy, of its own people. So it’s not designed to house a liturgy from the Middle Ages.”

As team members go about their daily duties, they’re keeping an eye on how the cathedral’s individual parts will add up to a sacred whole greater than its sum. The spiritual ambience they hope to create will be nuanced, multi-sensory and pan-cultural, they say, while fulfilling the doctrinal aims of the Roman Catholic faith.

“A large number of us working on the project are non-Catholic, so we have to relate to the project in a certain way,” says Hayden Salter, an architect serving as Moneo’s Los Angeles representative. “I think the beauty of this project is that a person who likes sitting on a rock in Sedona will also enjoy coming and sitting in this church.”

How to Construct a Sacred Space

The construction of sacred space hinges on many tangible factors: scale, proportion, the materials involved, color, the interplay of sound and light and the presence of sacred objects and artworks. Sacred space may involve hundreds of elements working in concert, or be as simple as a few natural or man-made objects artfully arranged.

Whatever its form, experts say, sacred space is somewhat of an abstraction. It’s an atmosphere created by the alchemical exchange within the space itself, the rituals performed there, and the human visitors who endow it with their personal histories, memories and associations.

“How do you make sacred space?” Vosko asks rhetorically. “My quick answer is, you don’t. You cannot. I don’t think that any human being can build a sacred space. I think the best thing a human being can do is create a most worthy architectural form that would house the ritual forms of a particular religion, whether it’s Jewish, Catholic, Muslim or whatnot.”

That’s not to say sacred space doesn’t exist. Rather, the priest notes, it may be acquired over time, accumulating in layers. “There are some things in the universe that create a sense of the sacred naturally,” says Vosko, 57, who has advanced degrees in liturgy, fine arts, theology and education. “Then there are some things that become sacred because of the things that people do there. For example, a city street can become sacred when a man and a woman fall in love there. Otherwise, it’s just a thoroughfare.”

With a $163-million price tag, and a total length a foot greater than St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, Our Lady of the Angels will have both the room and budget for exploring many contemporary notions about sacred space. The complex, which will include living quarters for the archbishop and priests, contemplative gardens, a cafe, a small gift shop and a plaza capable of seating 6,000, is scheduled to be formally dedicated in fall 2002.

In simplest terms, the cathedral is meant to embody the concept of a pilgrimage. Through a succession of architectural metaphors, it expresses the soul’s passage toward the redeeming light of faith.

Like many of its Western European forebears, the nave of Our Lady of the Angels will be laid out in the shape of a Latin cross. But in keeping with the directives of Vatican II, the congregation will be brought closer to the altar--within 100 feet for regular services. That configuration suggests a parallel with the way audiences will surround the orchestra at the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall, under construction a few blocks away.

Perhaps Moneo’s boldest stroke is to usher the faithful into the building from the altar end of the cathedral--the east side facing the interior plaza, rather than the west side set against the noisy congestion of Grand Avenue. After passing through a pair of three-story-tall bronze doors designed by Los Angeles sculptor Robert Graham, worshipers will be funneled through a block-long interior walkway, or “ambulatory,” that leads backward into the nave.

Chapels lining this ambulatory will face outward, rather than toward the nave, partly to avoid intruding on services. Worshipers will have the sensation of being on what Mahony calls a “journey of faith” as they make their way toward natural light streaming through 27,000 square feet of alabaster-glazed windows. En route they’ll pass a baptismal font, one of several sacred “thresholds” in this metaphorical life journey.

Light itself will be one of the cathedral’s main sacred elements, suffusing and transforming the building’s interior as the sun moves across the sky. Exalting light’s presence is especially appropriate in a region like Southern California, says Kostelnik. “Light is obviously a wonderful metaphor for truth, for beauty, for God,” he says. “People also are going to be glad we didn’t build a dark cathedral during this energy crisis.”

Our Lady of the Angels bears certain similarities to other Moneo buildings, such as the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain, and the Pilar and Joan Miro Foundation in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. In designing the chapels and the long ambulatory, Salter says, Moneo was inspired not only by Catholic liturgy but by the ancient, olive-tree-studded approach to Delphi, one of the holiest worship sites in the classical Greek world.

A similarly pan-cultural approach to sacredness will be visible in the great bronze doors, which will include not only multiple representations of the Virgin in different cultures but non-Christian icons such as the yin-yang symbol. “I think there was an understanding that the building could speak a variety of languages,” Salter says.

Indeed, after meeting with representatives of dozens of different language groups, the archdiocese determined that broad “accessibility” was a key to planning the cathedral. The challenge was to sustain this approachability without oversimplifying ideas not easily translated into concrete and metal. “We want everything confined, defined and refined and explained, and part of sacred space is mystery,” Kostelnik says.

Consequently, the cathedral’s visual and architectural vocabulary is more suggestive and abstract than explicit and literal-minded. “You don’t need St. Peter and St. Paul over the entrance,” Salter says. “This church avoids assigning meaning. It obviously will have a certain amount of rhetoric brought into it because it has a certain use.”

Ancient Construction Followed a Formula

In times past, sacred space construction tended to be more formulaic. Priestly castes and their patrons often built structures according to precise numerical and cosmological systems. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia, the ball courts of Mesoamerica and the mosques of Asia’s Muslim emperors were conceived as microcosms of a heavenly order, says Nick Roberts, project manager for Leo A Daly, the cathedral’s executive architect.

Later, Gothic cathedrals were built according to what then were considered divine mathematical ratios. The great cathedral at Chartres, France, used Pythagorean ratios derived from music.

“They thought this must be divinely ordained, and therefore [they said], ‘In the house of God we will use that,’ ” says Roberts, 53, a native of England whose grandfather was a high-ranking official in the Church of Wales. “There’s none of that here. The plan of this building [Our Lady of the Angels] is a very different logic.”

According to the late Mircea Eliade, the influential Romanian-born religious historian, sacred structures from antiquity onward were seen as conduits to the divine, umbilical cords linking heaven and earth. Many sacred spaces still are considered portals to other worlds. Some also take on archetypal attributes of the human body.

“Especially with this cathedral, which is Our Lady of the Angels, we’re talking about a great mother archetype,” says Chuck Pettis, the Seattle-based author of “Secrets of Sacred Space” (Llewellyn Publications, 1999). “So it’s very much a question of, ‘Does it feel like a vessel? Does one feel nourished and protected inside?’ These are very much the elements that one would look for.”

Permanence and durability have long been considered essential to sacredness. Our Lady of the Angels is being built to withstand a magnitude 8.3 earthquake, and its projected life span is 300 years. Yet such beliefs are by no means universal. Some African religions utilize open-air shrines and worship spaces that are intended to be temporal. In the Jewish faith, a family living room may be transformed into a sacred space during high holidays by means of only a few liturgical items, such as candles and a menorah.

In “Secrets of Sacred Space,” Pettis writes, “Anyone who creates a sacred space is an artist.” Our Lady of the Angels will contain numerous artworks, both antique and newly commissioned, and will host concerts and possibly other performing arts events.

Vosko notes that in secular society, art museums and other cultural venues have taken on a quasi-sacred function: the transmission of values across generations. Contemporary public artworks such as Robert Smithson’s famous “Spiral Jetty” (1970), a now-submerged 1,500-foot-long sculptural “earthwork” on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, further illustrate the centuries-old symbiosis of spirituality and art. “You can say a museum is sacred for some people, maybe, yes. You can say a concert hall is sacred, maybe, yes. You go there, you hear a concert, you can be moved,” Vosko says.

Ultimately, its orchestrators say, the new cathedral will be made sacred by the daily rites enacted there--the endless cycles of baptisms, celebrations and funerals, the liturgy that uplifts and inspires.

“What makes a space familiar is not just the objects that are present but the ritualization that takes place in a sacred space,” Kostelnik says. “God is present not only in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary.”