Copyright: © 2004 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

The name John Portman does not immediately jump to mind when you think of North America's premier architects. But he's single-handedly responsible, many would argue, for changing the look of North American public spaces. His offices are located in Atlanta, Georgia, and his Hyatt Regency hotel in that city became the model for many another subsequent hotel and resort.

His trademark vision for public buildings includes an enormous interior vault or atrium, often lit from above by a skylight. The Hyatt in Atlanta was a first. As I remember my initial visit, you enter from the street into a relatively conventional lobby or reception area, with a traditional ceiling height of, say, eight feet. Then you walk a few paces and stand, slack-jawed, in what they call the "Holy Mackerel!" location: The lobby has opened up into a prodigious interior atrium, twelve stories high, hung with vines and plantings. The effect is breathtaking.

"Wasted space!" cried Portman's early critics. But his conceptions have inspired the design of many other splendid public spaces, in locations all around the world. And Portman outdid himself some years later with his Marriott hotel, also in Atlanta: Here his central atrium soars a mind-boggling 45 floors above street level! (Can my memories be right about this?) And the atrium twists or torques as it rises, in such a way that, at street level it's on a north-south axis, but at the top it's on an east- west axis. With foot-bridges spanning the abyss at a couple of locations! Jaw- dropping audacity!

And, I would like to argue, "honouring the molecules", sensationally. See Essay 75 above, if you're unsure of my meaning here. I'd like to think that Christians, of all people, ought to respect and celebrate this kind of excellence in our world, wherever we find it. And we should be seeking and striving to emulate that kind of excellence too in our worship. Not out of a triumphalist instinct, but simply to feed the human spirit.

Item: For sixteen years --I'm embarrassed to admit it!-- I've owned a time-share in Cancun, Mexico. My wife and I bought in before the place was built, and I've spent two and even three weeks there every year, in my retirement. It's specially welcome in the middle of an Ontario winter. Each year I come away marveling at those thatched palapas that you find lining the beaches like eight-foot straw umbrellas. There are larger palapas as well, that shelter whole restaurants and resort lobbies and lounges: Magnificent post-and-beam construction, with a thatch that's a prodigy of engineering, especially when the thatch is composed of palm-fronds rather than simply grasses.

No screws, no nails, no wires: It's only gravity that holds those palm-fronds in place: A true marvel of ingenuous and elegant primitive technology! Not over- engineered, but just enough to do the job. It's holy space, in my view, even when it shelters a gin-mill. I could turn that gin-mill into a Christian cathedral with the labour of six men, in an hour's time, and at no expense! I find myself with tears in my eyes as I admire the simple elegance, the functional beauty of those thatches.

Item: I recently returned from a three-week tour of Italy and Sicily, where once again I found myself marveling at those magnificent terra-cotta tile roofs you see all over southern Europe. The roof-tile technology of Europe, in my view, matches the palm-frond thatches of the Caribbean for sophisticated but guileless elegance: simple terra-cotta cylinders, sliced lengthwise before firing, their two halves fitted together prone and supine, as you might say, across a rooftop, so as to drain off the rains and sleets of winter. Again, I'm greatly moved, almost weeping at the appropriateness, at the simple beauty of that technology.

Item: Every year in April, coinciding with the promise of prolepsis that Easter prefigures, I select a list of what I call my "Signs of the Kingdom" for the current year. They're five or six human artifacts or enterprises that signal, to me, that there's reason for hope out there, and not simply despair. My list is inspired by Philippians 4:8: "Whatever is good, and just, and lovely...take account of these things..."

Several years ago I selected automobile wheel-covers among my "Signs of the Reign of God". Have you ever thought about them in these terms? Just imagine: All those years of automobile manufacture. (A hundred? Or more?) All those makes and models. All those varied wheel-cover designs, from year to year. From make to make. From model to model. Every one of them different. Yet every one of them based on a simple circle! How many different ways can you design a simple circle into a wheel- cover? Automobile wheel covers are a symbol to me of the inexhaustible creativity of the human spirit.

Some examples more directly related to worship? Here's one, a negative example.

I have dear friends in a U.S. city who are members of a church whose building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It's a handsome stone structure in the early Twentieth Century's "arts-and-crafts" style, with a magnificent timbered ceiling spanning a space that's basically a Greek cross: Four short, wide, equal arms, with a glorious soaring central vault at the crossing of the east-west and north-south transepts.

The interior floor arrangement was re-configured recently with a free-standing altar, following the precepts of the Second Vatican Council. But the pews for the people remained steadfastly axial, east-facing, with altar and ambo and font still all squeezed into the east transept. That soaring central vault in that majestic timbered ceiling cried out, in my view, to be used as the focus for the ground-floor liturgical action, cried out for the people to be gathered radially around that central open core. But the silent pleading of that splendid space went unheard, or unheeded. Conventional pieties and presuppositions won out, over a truly inspired possibility --in my view, even over self- evidence. What a pity! Maybe next time the place is remodeled...

My "Signs of the Kingdom" for 2004? Here they are:

1. The roof-thatching in those Caribbean palapas. Not too much technology. Just enough to do the job. See above...

2. Those south European roof tiles. Ditto. Ditto. And ditto...

3. Howard Dean's brave and early criticism of George W. Bush's monstrous malefactions in Iraq. I'm just as glad he's not the Democrat's candidate. But he gave that party back its soul...

4. My chiropractor/kinesiologist. She's been able to alleviate the peanut allergy in the child of a friend. And that friend's own adverse reactions to coffee and chocolate. By, for example --Get this!-- stretching you out, fully clothed, on her table, asking you to extend your arm and touch your third finger to your thumb, and then observing the soles of your shoes! Miraculous! But it somehow works!

5. My new Canon Powershot digital camera. A miracle of modern technological brilliance. Takes splendid vibrant colour images. AND three-minute movies. With sound. And the whole thing is smaller than a cigarette pack. (See? I'm not, like, TOTALLY a Luddite!)..