DOORS OF SALVATION.

Churches
Judith Dupre
HarperCollins, $35, 168 pp.
Lives of Service
Stories from Maryknoll
Jim Daniels
Orbis, $25, 128 pp.

It is not often one can confess with the psalmist, "We will go up to the house of the Lord with joy." The reasons are many. We each carry a great deal of personal, communal, aesthetic, and theological baggage. Often the house of the Lord is not merely less than magnificent, it is tacky. The actions of its ministers can add to our sense of inner distraction. In such a setting, the effort to worship fruitfully--to pray in unison, with self-forgetfulness and delight-- can seem painful, even futile. These two oversized volumes, handsomely illustrated but strikingly different in scope and theme, give some indication as to both the difficulties and the glory involved. They are part pilgrimage, part proclamation.

Judith Dupre's Churches, a chronological guide to Christian church architecture, examines over eighty houses of worship, from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People in Queens, New York. Despite a heavy emphasis on cathedrals, the book includes a wide range of denominational meeting spaces, high and low. Dupre's stated aim is to create "a work of art that reflects the grandeur of its subject matter." She commences brilliantly, with a sixteen-by-twelve-inch wrap-around cover depicting Donatello's 1433 gilded limestone sculpture, Annunciation, from Santa Croce, Florence. It glistens with a thick varnish-like finish that compels opening, parting at the center like a medieval church's baptistry doors. From there the reader is drawn into a panoramic, double-page reproduction of the fourth-century apsidal mosaic of San Clemente in Rome, a veritable garden of Christian iconography. No matter how often one opens this book, the entrance rite itself elevates the imagination and promises page after page of visual treasure.

Churches is part photographic extravaganza (more than two hundred color and black-and-white photographs), part history and guide book. It ranges across the full Christian timeline and draws examples from the corners of the earth. The walls of colored glass at Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, rise up like glowing stones; the graduated wooden gables of Norway's thirteenth-century Borgund Stave marry Norse mythology, Catholicism, and pagoda-like layers; Moscow's recently reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Savior strives to banish memories of its destruction under Stalin.

The theological spectrum is also broad, from Coptic to Unitarian. Dupre's selection is necessarily subjective, an occupational hazard unfortunately reinforced by chatty asides (Westminster Abbey is "a veritable icon of the Protestant faith"). This disappoints since the author inaugurates the volume with a substantive interview with Swiss Italian architect Mario Botta. Best known in this country for designing San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, Botta seems to thrive on creating public buildings, particularly libraries and churches. Dupre gives Botta ample space to describe his architectural rationale, a combination of Romanesque and modernist, and to present examples of his work. His Marian chapel at Tamaro, Switzerland soars over an alpine valley, making you feel as if you were sky diving. His cathedral at Evry, near Paris, combines natural light and textures with a keen sacramental understanding. There is even a ring of living trees that ascends the structure's exterior, like a living crown.

Botta is a serious thinker and craftsman for whom architecture is an art that is spiritually transformative while providing concrete points of reference. Church structures in particular are important, since they locate communal memory and facilitate the personal encounter with life's mysteries. In a church, Botta observes, "you are already part of what has transpired and will transpire there." In a revealing exchange, Dupre says that Botta's buildings "are strikingly different in person than they appear in photographs." To which Botta responds, "A photograph is only an approximation." That quote tends to haunt the rest of Churches; despite its gorgeous photographs, there is no substitute for standing beneath the Pantheon's awe-producing oculus or for hearing the "Salve Regina" disappear into the golden domes of San Marco. Curiously absent from many of the photographs are actual worshipers. This not only diminishes a sense of human perspective but gives the faulty impression that the structures represented are simply tourist destinations rather than centers of prayer.

In contrast, Lives of Service is the People of God (the church, in its broad sense) observed in prayer, action, and sometimes heroic circumstances. A limited study of nine contemporary Maryknoll missioners, lay and religious, on four continents, Lives conveys the immediacy of God's presence as manifest in the missioners' everyday lives.

An eleven-by-eleven-inch photographic journal, Lives combines brief commentary with 120 vivid images by National Geographic photographer Jim Daniels. Daniels spent four years on the project; his talent and respect for his subjects are apparent throughout. Readers of Maryknoll magazine will recognize his photography and relish the folio-size treatment offered by Lives.

The Maryknoll mission society has a proud, courageous history. True to its American roots, for ninety years it has melded both daring and diversity to bring the gospel to the earth's poorest peoples. Daniels provides a short description of Maryknoll's three branches--which include priests and brothers, sisters, laypeople and associate priests--and then takes off for the far field with camera in hand. He visits Bangladesh, Thailand, Cambodia, war-stricken Sudan, Tanzania, New Guinea, and Panama. At each site, he chronicles the Maryknollers' lives in at least two distinct venues. (Unfortunately, the book provides no maps.) Often, the contrast represented is between urban setting and mission outpost, reached only after arduous, often dangerous travel. While the indigenous people presented are our contemporaries, they live in different centuries.

Maryknoll not only anticipated much of the new missiology promulgated at Vatican II, but has long promoted enculturating the gospel where it meets people. Just how rich and kaleidoscopic this turns out to be is vividly captured by Daniels's camera: the blood-red robes of Masai tribesmen dance against Tanzania's green hills; a Hindu Bengali dye maker's magenta-stained hands welcome a visitor; the glistening beads and skin of Toposa girls shine in warring Sudan; the silhouette of Admat fishermen reflects off glinting waters in New Guinea. These images are gorgeous yet far from romanticized. Father Bob McCahill of Goshen, Indiana, says a solitary early morning Mass, then carries a dying Muslim into a teeming Bengali hospital; Sister Juana Encalada nurses a woman dying of aids in Phnom Penh; Brother John Belching visits displaced Cambodian war refugees in Thailand; and Doctor Susan Nagele conducts an outdoor clinic amid war and mayhem in Sudan.

The photographs' inherent beauty and painful subject matter provoke a sense of dissonance. Yet their brilliance and nobility convey a liberating vitality. Here Christianity is not mere edifice or past history, but open, young, and exploratory, a confirmation of God's interest. In a word, here Christianity is worshipful.

Patrick Jordan is Commonweal's managing editor.