Cathedral - January 28, 2012

I walked Anya around the St Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota this morning, while Daniel was working on math with a friend. It wasn't all that cold, but there was a stiff wind. Anya enjoyed it, and I got the chance to walk around a space which, twenty years ago, I had worked on a proposal for a public art piece. I wasn't able to see whatever the art was they ended up picking.

The proposal was for a mound, shaped like a hand, with a tree (a burr oak in my proposal) growing out of the palm. I still think it's a cool image.

Our idea of public worship, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world, involves entering a building set aside for the purpose. It's not that you can't pray outside, and there are certainly deeply important things in the traditions that involve outdoor spaces: processions and pilgrimages, burnt offerings and miraculous appearances. But the core ritual, the weekly religious acts, are indoor affairs.

One of the things that indigenous religious traditions have brought to western consciousness, at least in the Americas and the Australia/Pacific arenas, is the idea of outdoor sacred spaces. Early American environmentalists cottoned on to the idea of sacred outdoors pretty early:

Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.
- John Muir

But even here, to make the argument to a Euro-American audience, it had to fall back on analogies to indoor religious spaces.

Pagan revivalists, especially Druids with their "groves," have also done a lot to bring the idea of the outdoors as a formal religious space into the public consciousness. Of course, it could be argued that by placing themselves in opposition to Abrahamic churches, and their worship spaces as out of doors, they were making sure more conservative Christians especially would become more opposed to worshiping out of doors as somehow "pagan"...

Last winter I went on some Saturday morning that Daniel had a class or something, and spent about an hour in the Como Park Conservatory, a wonderfully moist, green space in the bleak Minnesota winter. I ended up just sitting and letting the green be around me, closing my eyes. Just being still. It was wonderful. But it was not being outdoors; in fact, it was a highly artificial natural experience. Does this matter? Does "connecting with nature" entail sitting in the out-of-doors regardless of how hospitable those out-of-doors are?