Thanks for taking the time to answer my question! I love the way you talk about friendship, sociality, and (if I may extend it slightly) community as a foundation of religious life. I don't share some of your theology around marriage or grace, but the idea that living a religious life in relationship with other people is central to our relationship to God resonates deeply. Communal prayer, but also shared meals on the Sabbath and holiday gatherings are so central to a my religious life, and build a space where we are acting as servants of God in daily life. Especially as a person who moved to a new community shortly before lockdown began, I'm very much feeling the absence of those physically proximate friendships, and it has an impact on my religious observance in small powerful ways.
On the other hand, I'm still struggling with this idea of the city as hostile to religious life. I recognize that as a symbol of contemporary commercial, secular life, the way it commodifies identity and self, the city is very powerful. A place of loneliness among teeming millions, of spiritual isolation and poverty. And yet, this was not my experience of living in cities. Religious community in cities is some of the most vibrant and powerful I've ever seen. Cities are full of people looking for community, and for God, and they build spaces and relationships that reflect their search. Cities are full of communities, overlapping and fertile. The idea of the atomizing modern city, though not false, is only part of the story. In terms of creating time and space for prayer and religious life, cities are far more successful than suburbs (I've spent no time in rural communities, so I can't speak to those). I can only speak to my experience within Judaism here, so I apologize if this isn't universal (though I very strongly suspect that believers of other religious groups will have similar examples). Look at a block of office buildings in a city with a large Jewish population in the winter when the sun sets early and you will be able to find a prayer quorum praying the afternoon service. Search those same districts during the fall, and on the holiday of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) you'll be able to track down a sukkah or two where observant Jews can eat a meal while observing the requirement to do so in a temporary dwelling. Obviously, this has to do with concentrations of observant Jews, and there are large cities where you won't find these things. But precisely because cities are large, dense and diverse they provide opportunity for like minded folks who care about building religious community to find each other and create their own space and time, whether with co-workers and office mates or neighbors. The administration of the city may not be as conducive as we would like to religious life and community (though I think it's far less hostile than you and Fr. Danielou's make it seem), but the space and structure of the city are extremely friendly to building them.
For my own part, most of my favorite experiences of community in prayer are in cities! For one thing, there are so many people that I find it's easier to get enough people interested in an offbeat thing (like a rosary procession or a bookclub on Pieper). I find it harder when I have a smaller pool of people to draw on.
I miss shared meals so much in the pandemic. It makes me so much happier to cook for other people and make it a gift.
I love this formulation of “consecratable space.” I’ve definitely enjoyed living and working on a college campus over the past few years where meditation rooms and other contemplative spaces (including gardens and a nondenominational chapel) have always been available to me for prayer between classes. Much of the time that prayer was solitary, but occasionally I’d end up sharing prayer space with someone who’d come to the room to meditate, pray with a different tradition from mine, or just have lunch in peace. I came to really love that “airport-chapel” vibe and didn’t experience it as “generic” so much as ecumenical. Planning ecumenical encounters is hard, but facilitating them, it turns out, is actually pretty easy. But all of that is much more doable on a college campus than other types of workplaces - as Leah says, I’d much rather have an office job actually respect my lunch hour than provide a contemplative break room to eat it in.
Anyway, those campus spaces are all closed during the pandemic, so I’ve gone back to an older habit of mine: praying in cemeteries. Cemeteries, like parks, are free, open city spaces that lend themselves to solitary prayer, communal prayer, and sociality alike. They are also good places to invite people to perform the spiritual work of mercy that is praying for the living and the dead. I remember coming across an Orthodox Christian ministry that maintained cemeteries as a way of fulfilling the corresponding corporal work of mercy, burying the dead. You don’t need to have known somebody in their earthly life to clean off their grave, bring flowers and say a Rosary for their soul! And like I said, during pandemic times when we’re all thinking about death more than we might have, this is a good, concrete thing to do (a) outside (b) together (c) to face this moment head-on.
tldr memento mori. I honestly think grief brings people together in prayer more than anything else these days and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.
Everyone has definitely pitched me on actually poking my nose into an airport chapel (when it's finally safe to travel) rather than making assumptions. I have a higher expectation of hospital chapels, which are also ecumenical, but where it feels like the architects must have a stronger sense of the need.
I've never visited, but Boston Logan airport has a Catholic chapel in Terminal D: Our Lady of the Airways.
"The 1965 Catholic chapel remains today with an altar and crucifix, stations of the cross, and holy water at the doors. The Eucharist is available in the chapel and mass is led regularly by the airport’s Catholic chaplain-priest who is assigned by and accountable to the Boston Archdiocese. Travelers as well as airport staff and local residents of East Boston regularly attend mass. At some point, a prayer rug was added to the back corner of the chapel with a small hand written sign pointing towards Mecca in recognition of Muslim staff and travelers in need of a place to pray. "
"Air travel for large segments of the population was new in the early 1950s when Boston Archbishop Richard J. Cushing decided to build Our Lady of the Airways, a Catholic chapel at Logan airport. Primarily concerned about Catholic staff working long shifts at the airport without the opportunity to attend mass, Cushing aimed to bring the celebration of mass to the workers. Cushing brought priests to the airport and to other venues as he built workmen’s chapels in the port, train station, and other venues across Boston. These chapels also helped Cushing solve the problem of surplus priests created as soldiers and military chaplains returned to Boston from World War II. The airport chaplaincy and others provided postings for these priests while expanding services to Boston Catholics as well as Catholic airline staff and others who traveled through Logan International Airport. "
Hospitals also have chaplaincy staff, often from multiple religious traditions. Having spoken with friends who are chaplains, they're very serious about creating effective ecumenical environments, where they can serve practitioners of different religions in addition to their own. There are people in hospitals actively trying to make this work, which I imagine has a significant impact on the space as well.
Despite having prayed many times in airports, both by myself and with a group, I have never set foot in an airport chapel. I love this notion of consecratable space, and I also wonder how consecratable time fits in. I have to pray before my flight, so that time needs to be built in to my pre-flight plans, but am I going to build in the time to seek out the chapel, go there, and then get to the gate? Or am I not going to take the time and instead pray at the gate, which is certainly suboptimal on all levels. Would the chapel make a difference? Or would the extra time pressure (and I get pretty serious travel anxiety before I fly until I'm at the gate) make things worse? How do the liminal nature of both travel as an activity and airports as a space play into this equation? What can I do to consecrate the time I have for prayer at the gate, if I can't or won't go to the chapel? These are practical questions, (at least for me), and ones I haven't thought about in a real way before. Thanks for raising these issues.
I find the experience of praying at the airport gate itself such a defining part of travel! When I end up praying at the gate it's almost always in the morning (since I can just pray on the plane if I don't need to be wearing all my prayer accessories - tallit and tefillin, which many observant Jews wear when praying shacharit, the morning prayer service [explaining not for you, Jesse, but other people reading!] and I always find that doing something that weird on the airplane itself gets me so many funny looks and makes me so uncomfortable that I'll even skip it), and I find that being kitted-out in my prayer stuff while looking out at the planes and seeing the sunrise -- well, somewhat at least, since Jews pray facing west -- is a key part of what travel feels like and always is a particular, special prayer experience. Though definitely it always has me a little on edge, to do something that publicly weird-looking in a space as tense as an airport, especially when I'm on my own.
I've never been in an airport chapel, but I agree there's something thrilling about praying on a plane and seeing so many places and people to pray for that I don't know personally. I have to pray trusting that prayer is fruitful, without seeing its results. (And it reminds me that I don't know who is praying for _me_!)
Oh, I've never thought to pray for people around me in those situations - it always feels like I'm doing something private or that's supposed to be in a specific community in a totally exposed/displaced way, which has its own charge, so I always just import that private posture, as it were, rather than thinking about the ways in which my prayers can be about and enriched by the actual people around me rather than just the liminality of the space or the experience of public weirdness (a part of religion which I love and treasure). I'm absolutely going to take that with me next time I pray in an airport or on a plane, thank you!
I have been thinking a lot about the Carthusian way of life and the family. It seems like a possible model for parish life. Individual families live isolated from one another(like hermits) only coming together occasionally for Sunday or Holy day worship. I realize this is poo pooed in the QnA but how do we know if the community is sick or just being lead in a new direction by the Holy Spirit? Parish life seems extremely difficult these days with so many competing ideologies over styles of parenting, politics and liturgy (vaccines) it seems families are healthier and happier avoiding each other.
I think you're pointing at a real wound in the body of Christ, and sometimes we may need some time in silence and peace to prepare ourselves to resume work binding it up, but I don't think isolation is a solution. In the Carthusian way of life, there's an underlying unity among the men who have all undertaken the same vows and pray for each other, even as they are physically and vocally distant. Without that shared purpose, I don't think separation can be fruitful.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question! I love the way you talk about friendship, sociality, and (if I may extend it slightly) community as a foundation of religious life. I don't share some of your theology around marriage or grace, but the idea that living a religious life in relationship with other people is central to our relationship to God resonates deeply. Communal prayer, but also shared meals on the Sabbath and holiday gatherings are so central to a my religious life, and build a space where we are acting as servants of God in daily life. Especially as a person who moved to a new community shortly before lockdown began, I'm very much feeling the absence of those physically proximate friendships, and it has an impact on my religious observance in small powerful ways.
On the other hand, I'm still struggling with this idea of the city as hostile to religious life. I recognize that as a symbol of contemporary commercial, secular life, the way it commodifies identity and self, the city is very powerful. A place of loneliness among teeming millions, of spiritual isolation and poverty. And yet, this was not my experience of living in cities. Religious community in cities is some of the most vibrant and powerful I've ever seen. Cities are full of people looking for community, and for God, and they build spaces and relationships that reflect their search. Cities are full of communities, overlapping and fertile. The idea of the atomizing modern city, though not false, is only part of the story. In terms of creating time and space for prayer and religious life, cities are far more successful than suburbs (I've spent no time in rural communities, so I can't speak to those). I can only speak to my experience within Judaism here, so I apologize if this isn't universal (though I very strongly suspect that believers of other religious groups will have similar examples). Look at a block of office buildings in a city with a large Jewish population in the winter when the sun sets early and you will be able to find a prayer quorum praying the afternoon service. Search those same districts during the fall, and on the holiday of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) you'll be able to track down a sukkah or two where observant Jews can eat a meal while observing the requirement to do so in a temporary dwelling. Obviously, this has to do with concentrations of observant Jews, and there are large cities where you won't find these things. But precisely because cities are large, dense and diverse they provide opportunity for like minded folks who care about building religious community to find each other and create their own space and time, whether with co-workers and office mates or neighbors. The administration of the city may not be as conducive as we would like to religious life and community (though I think it's far less hostile than you and Fr. Danielou's make it seem), but the space and structure of the city are extremely friendly to building them.
For my own part, most of my favorite experiences of community in prayer are in cities! For one thing, there are so many people that I find it's easier to get enough people interested in an offbeat thing (like a rosary procession or a bookclub on Pieper). I find it harder when I have a smaller pool of people to draw on.
I miss shared meals so much in the pandemic. It makes me so much happier to cook for other people and make it a gift.
I love this formulation of “consecratable space.” I’ve definitely enjoyed living and working on a college campus over the past few years where meditation rooms and other contemplative spaces (including gardens and a nondenominational chapel) have always been available to me for prayer between classes. Much of the time that prayer was solitary, but occasionally I’d end up sharing prayer space with someone who’d come to the room to meditate, pray with a different tradition from mine, or just have lunch in peace. I came to really love that “airport-chapel” vibe and didn’t experience it as “generic” so much as ecumenical. Planning ecumenical encounters is hard, but facilitating them, it turns out, is actually pretty easy. But all of that is much more doable on a college campus than other types of workplaces - as Leah says, I’d much rather have an office job actually respect my lunch hour than provide a contemplative break room to eat it in.
Anyway, those campus spaces are all closed during the pandemic, so I’ve gone back to an older habit of mine: praying in cemeteries. Cemeteries, like parks, are free, open city spaces that lend themselves to solitary prayer, communal prayer, and sociality alike. They are also good places to invite people to perform the spiritual work of mercy that is praying for the living and the dead. I remember coming across an Orthodox Christian ministry that maintained cemeteries as a way of fulfilling the corresponding corporal work of mercy, burying the dead. You don’t need to have known somebody in their earthly life to clean off their grave, bring flowers and say a Rosary for their soul! And like I said, during pandemic times when we’re all thinking about death more than we might have, this is a good, concrete thing to do (a) outside (b) together (c) to face this moment head-on.
tldr memento mori. I honestly think grief brings people together in prayer more than anything else these days and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.
Everyone has definitely pitched me on actually poking my nose into an airport chapel (when it's finally safe to travel) rather than making assumptions. I have a higher expectation of hospital chapels, which are also ecumenical, but where it feels like the architects must have a stronger sense of the need.
I've never visited, but Boston Logan airport has a Catholic chapel in Terminal D: Our Lady of the Airways.
"The 1965 Catholic chapel remains today with an altar and crucifix, stations of the cross, and holy water at the doors. The Eucharist is available in the chapel and mass is led regularly by the airport’s Catholic chaplain-priest who is assigned by and accountable to the Boston Archdiocese. Travelers as well as airport staff and local residents of East Boston regularly attend mass. At some point, a prayer rug was added to the back corner of the chapel with a small hand written sign pointing towards Mecca in recognition of Muslim staff and travelers in need of a place to pray. "
"Air travel for large segments of the population was new in the early 1950s when Boston Archbishop Richard J. Cushing decided to build Our Lady of the Airways, a Catholic chapel at Logan airport. Primarily concerned about Catholic staff working long shifts at the airport without the opportunity to attend mass, Cushing aimed to bring the celebration of mass to the workers. Cushing brought priests to the airport and to other venues as he built workmen’s chapels in the port, train station, and other venues across Boston. These chapels also helped Cushing solve the problem of surplus priests created as soldiers and military chaplains returned to Boston from World War II. The airport chaplaincy and others provided postings for these priests while expanding services to Boston Catholics as well as Catholic airline staff and others who traveled through Logan International Airport. "
http://www.hiddensacredspaces.org/our-lady-of-the-airways-logan-airport-boston
Hospitals also have chaplaincy staff, often from multiple religious traditions. Having spoken with friends who are chaplains, they're very serious about creating effective ecumenical environments, where they can serve practitioners of different religions in addition to their own. There are people in hospitals actively trying to make this work, which I imagine has a significant impact on the space as well.
Despite having prayed many times in airports, both by myself and with a group, I have never set foot in an airport chapel. I love this notion of consecratable space, and I also wonder how consecratable time fits in. I have to pray before my flight, so that time needs to be built in to my pre-flight plans, but am I going to build in the time to seek out the chapel, go there, and then get to the gate? Or am I not going to take the time and instead pray at the gate, which is certainly suboptimal on all levels. Would the chapel make a difference? Or would the extra time pressure (and I get pretty serious travel anxiety before I fly until I'm at the gate) make things worse? How do the liminal nature of both travel as an activity and airports as a space play into this equation? What can I do to consecrate the time I have for prayer at the gate, if I can't or won't go to the chapel? These are practical questions, (at least for me), and ones I haven't thought about in a real way before. Thanks for raising these issues.
I find the experience of praying at the airport gate itself such a defining part of travel! When I end up praying at the gate it's almost always in the morning (since I can just pray on the plane if I don't need to be wearing all my prayer accessories - tallit and tefillin, which many observant Jews wear when praying shacharit, the morning prayer service [explaining not for you, Jesse, but other people reading!] and I always find that doing something that weird on the airplane itself gets me so many funny looks and makes me so uncomfortable that I'll even skip it), and I find that being kitted-out in my prayer stuff while looking out at the planes and seeing the sunrise -- well, somewhat at least, since Jews pray facing west -- is a key part of what travel feels like and always is a particular, special prayer experience. Though definitely it always has me a little on edge, to do something that publicly weird-looking in a space as tense as an airport, especially when I'm on my own.
I've never been in an airport chapel, but I agree there's something thrilling about praying on a plane and seeing so many places and people to pray for that I don't know personally. I have to pray trusting that prayer is fruitful, without seeing its results. (And it reminds me that I don't know who is praying for _me_!)
Oh, I've never thought to pray for people around me in those situations - it always feels like I'm doing something private or that's supposed to be in a specific community in a totally exposed/displaced way, which has its own charge, so I always just import that private posture, as it were, rather than thinking about the ways in which my prayers can be about and enriched by the actual people around me rather than just the liminality of the space or the experience of public weirdness (a part of religion which I love and treasure). I'm absolutely going to take that with me next time I pray in an airport or on a plane, thank you!
I have been thinking a lot about the Carthusian way of life and the family. It seems like a possible model for parish life. Individual families live isolated from one another(like hermits) only coming together occasionally for Sunday or Holy day worship. I realize this is poo pooed in the QnA but how do we know if the community is sick or just being lead in a new direction by the Holy Spirit? Parish life seems extremely difficult these days with so many competing ideologies over styles of parenting, politics and liturgy (vaccines) it seems families are healthier and happier avoiding each other.
I think you're pointing at a real wound in the body of Christ, and sometimes we may need some time in silence and peace to prepare ourselves to resume work binding it up, but I don't think isolation is a solution. In the Carthusian way of life, there's an underlying unity among the men who have all undertaken the same vows and pray for each other, even as they are physically and vocally distant. Without that shared purpose, I don't think separation can be fruitful.