Sacred Spaces.

Why build cathedrals if a street corner will do?

Sacred space is today both more expansive and more dilute. People have widened their claim to worship in "nature" -- hiking a mountain, for example, rather than praying in a sanctuary -- to include worship at workshops, before, during and after kids' soccer matches, anywhere, anytime. The made beautiful world of the museum joins the "wild" world of nature to satisfy the urgency for the religious. Worship is as portable as our food and phone, as comfortable as our sneakers, as accessible twenty-four hours a day as the Internet. Many Protestant churches now offer a "dress down" Sunday once a month so as to be more user-friendly and to create an even more homogeneous world. Without costumes to distinguish one event from another, modern believers enjoy the comfort of the continuous. Believers blend both time and space: they have a toe in the water of faith and are moved to worship by normal human factors, ranging all the way from the stress in their own lives to secular tragedy and public spectacle. People worsh ip more now, not less -- but they worship outside the sacred time and space categories of more traditional faith.

Not only has the place of worship changed. The time has also changed and fragmented. Movable parts -- in strange mimic of the industrial world -- describe the worship habits of those who are no more or less desperate for the sacred than their forebears. Sunday has changed -- and those of us in the institutional religious community are just beginning to figure out how to respond to the changes.

Many of the most moving and most easily caricatured examples of liturgical space happen around tragedy today. People build altars with rocks and flowers on the site of the Oklahoma City bombing; the local Methodist church there struggled to keep up with the ritualized behavior of people who stayed outside it to find a spiritual ritual closer to the bombing site. Coming "in" was a possibility but most people stuck to the street, the edge, the outer sanctuary steps. This expansion of the religions space simultaneously created a dilution. There was more space -- an inner and an outer sanctuary -- but it was more like water than like wine. The inner was diluted by the outer world's absence -- and the steps were not enriched by the liturgical practice of the more disciplined inner. The quick placement of flowers is no rival to the "long" saying of communal prayers -- and both inner-ring and outer-ring communities are intensely aware of the absence of the other in their "space." The conversations about who is not there in mainstream congregations have become ritualistic: "Why don't they join us?" is their mantra.

Crosses are erected on the hill over the Columbine High School; they are taken down and put back up, ritually, not in an argument about the separation of church and society but instead in a street-level argument about whether there is any hope. Some of the antagonists in this street-level spiritual drama felt that the crosses implied premature, phony hope; they were demonstrating the development of their own theology. The putting up of the crosses and the taking down of the crosses represented the web and weave of social and spiritual conflict about religion, practiced in public, without benefit of priest, bishop, chasuble, brass candlestick, prayer book, or formal liturgy.

Blended populations and portable time and space do not result in an absence of spiritual practice. Instead, they result in an expanded if secularized practice of the sacred. When so much is potentially so sacred, even if and as contested, there is a real threat to the genuine. Why build cathedrals at all if a street corner will do? The blending is considered impure by the cradle Congregationalist or cradle Jew who fears the "bastardization" of the faith when they caricature and complain. The new faith has no parents: in fact, it rejects its parents. It is illegitimate, impure, mixed, miscegenated. It uses expanded and diluted spaces and fragmented times to win its independence.

As easy as it is to poke fun at flowers on church steps or city corners, as easy as it is to bemoan the loss of historical liturgy in pizza-and-coke communions or Columbine cross maneuvering, I find a silver lining in these clouds, even a glimmer of new revelation. If people make liturgy themselves, their way, can there be that much lost in returning the act of praise and petition to the "work of the people"? The transfer of power has just begun: the forms are not mature. But liturgical power no longer belongs to the credentialed. The people are back in charge.

I don't want to minimize the losses. They include the beauty of the music of the ages made for sanctuaries from baroque to Bauhaus. Chartres could simply not be made today--if for no other reason than the lack of focused attention and near impossibility of cooperation. When I think of monks copying the ancient holy words of the many testaments -- and then discover that the majority of fourteen-year-olds today think the book of Jonah is in the New Testament--I cringe. My heart breaks. But stuffing the genie or the God back in the bottle is simply not possible. People can't be forced to love beauty, especially credentialed beauty.

Instead, we have a diving invitation to create open space for the expansion of God's revelation. That space can and should be in maximum dialogue with historical liturgies but only as dialogue, not as restriction. Too many of our "tsk, tsks" about the faith that people have taken to the streets is elitist, authoritarian, and bottled. We want neither new wine nor new wineskins. God has burst the old institutions and the people know it. When we defend the old good wines, we are invited to see something big, new and good, which is God's liberation from our sacred space. We can defend the wines only as wines, the wines as wineskins--not idolatrously as God's last words, architectural or musical, to humanity.

Traditional authorities and authority figures no longer hold sway. Today, the horizontal society reigns -- a virtual reality where the former social hierarchies no longer rule, and environment where, says Yale law professor Lawrence Friedman, our sense of identity has been irretrievably altered, where we choose affiliation in a way that frightens us to our boots. God will have no trouble breaking through--especially if we get some of our institutions and liturgies out of the way.

We can't underestimate or overestimate the dangers or the losses. Religious institutions and liturgies are perhaps our best hope to keep the entire globe from turning into a receptacle for American popular culture, which is only a little more than the velvet costume Capitalism wears to dominate. Still, if they are not humbly horizontal themselves, they won't even get a place in the conversation or at the table. Relying on their own punishing "tsk, tsks" will simply not avail. Authority, yes; authoritarian, no: the authority needs to go in dialogue with the more shallow, post-liturgical authorities. We have lost our shelter in the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of revelations. That loss is real; it is not to be whined about. It is to be acted upon.

What we have to be afraid of is the monoculture, the monolingual space in which Capitalism loves to flatten the transcendent. We don't have to be afraid of losing Sunday or sanctuary. These fears, while legitimate, keep us from directing attention to the enemy, which is the flattening greed of global Capitalism. In the multiplication of liturgical, spiritual, and religious places, the flattening is delayed. While the shrines to Princess Diana after her death became so burdensome to some of the family that they actually asked in public that no more flowers be added, for others they were very meaningful. People without a lot of money bought flowers to put on her "grave" the way the altar guild used to appoint a flower committee. The difference is serious: one is organized, institutional, collective, regulated, historical, while the other is individual, personal, temporary: the flowers fade, they are here today and gone tomorrow. But this moment-making seems to make people more rather than less comfortable. Thi s moment-making also allows them the kind of transcendence that is the best hope against the great leveler and homogenizer of the global engine.

Multifaith, postdenominational and postliturgical people are uncomfortable with established religion. They fear it. To save the very liturgies and histories we love, we must understand and even appreciate, not condemn, the increasingly blended nature of the constituencies that our pastors, rabbis, gurus, and congregations serve. These constituencies are already more plural than we comprehend; for the most part, they like their pluralism. While the relationship between "multifaith" and "postdenominational" may be a bit problematic, in that one does not necessarily imply the other, nevertheless these two dynamics describe the kinds of blending we see in the culture and in our parishes. Sometimes one exists without the other, but more and more they show up in one pew and another in different forms. The multifaith spiritual experience has inevitable consequences for the institutional vessel: it seems unworthy of the voyage the faithful want to take. People speak increasingly of denominations as "old" and their s pirituality as "new."

Sociologists differ between old-style American "external pluralism" involving multiple religions within the society and "internal pluralism" involving multiple religions within individuals. We experience the effect of both in culture and congregation. While we are nowhere near a melting pot, just as globalization has not yet wiped out all ethnicity, still the trend is toward blending in the populations we serve in Protestant parishes. This blending underlies the seismic liturgical shifts we are experiencing. Not only do people move between time zones, sometimes on a daily basis, in their work, they also move in what the Dutch architect Rem Koolhas calls a zone, or moving fluid space. Blend joins motion to create a new kind of people; we can't be surprised that such a new people would birth a postsanctuary, post-Sunday or (even) post-Saturday liturgy. The pluralism and the liturgies of these peoples deserve our respect, not our credentialed dismay. God may even like blend better than homogeneity.

I read Marion Edelman, an African-American Baptist woman who married a white Jewish man and is raising children in both traditions. I read Shelby Foote, a Southern Baptist who married a Jew in New Orleans and lived to tell some great stories. Or C. S. Lewis, the famous Christian writer who married, late in life, a Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity. He then assured one of her children a Jewish education after she died. These educated and accomplished people are wedge figures; they represent the inevitable blending of the population as cultural markers themselves. As part of the new and ongoing revelation of God, these people are showing us something important, if expansive and if dilute.

There is a new piety and people are making it up as they go along. Private prayer joins public prayer as a site for the people's experimentation. They not only take to the streets in their own made-up liturgical responses to tragedy; they also develop highly individualized, institutionally unsupported ways to worship. They are more pious than they realize.

Piety is the habit of prayer in everyday life. It is a devotion to religious duties and practices. It comes as a word from a German movement founded by P. J. Spener (1635-1705) who advocated a revival of the devotional idea in the Lutheran Church. Today we hear the word "spirituality" used interchangeably with the more old-fashioned "piety." "I am developing my spirituality" translates quite well to mean: "I am devoting myself to religious duties and practices."

The people who create their own inner, private sacred space are often doing so in response to a perceived institutional abuse of piety, where people faked religious affection by hollow observances. This very lack of trust in the old wineskin has resulted in a devotional flowering among individuals. Again, the loss of the old sacred spaces has opened and expanded the place of the sacred in the lives of people. There is more, not less, God in normal lives. People read devotions and read them devotionally, they walk labyrinths, they fast and pray. There is a new piety and it is growing.

The anxiety of the institutional churches about the loss of liturgy has gone on long enough. It is time to open space for God's action with the people -- and their inevitable, beautiful, risky responses.

DONNA SCHAPER is ordained in the United Church of Christ and the author of Keeping Sabbath, among other books and numerous articles.