SWLC Study Week - Deacon Owen Cummings

Worship spaces can be contrary and contradic­tory, but they perfectly reflect who we are as a Church, said Deacon Owen Cummings in his address “Worship and the Catholic Imagination: The Church as Sacred Space.”

Using poets and stories from his own personal background, Deacon Cummings, the Regents’ Chair of Theology at Mount Angel Seminary in St. Benedict, Oregon, noted that despite all our flaws and brokenness, it is Jesus and His love for the Church that ultimately turns those “mess­es” into sacred space.

He began by echoing a sentiment expressed by many who stopped attending church regular­ly, choosing instead to find God in nature. “Lots of people will say that the forest is my cathedral or the canyon is my church, and they are right.”

“God is in all his creation,” Deacon Cum­mings said. “Why do we need buildings to wor­ship in?”

Churches traditionally take different shapes and forms, with Western Catholic buildings con­structed in cruciform style to reflect the cruci­fixion. However,
Eastern Catholic churches tend to be circular with images that lead worshippers to feeling that they are part of the Resurrection culture, residing in the communion of saints.

Deacon Cummings cited the British poet Philip Larkin, an atheist whose poem “Church Going” talks about his visit to a rural church and graveyard that unexpectedly moved him.

This piece and others like it are “invitations to us to be more serious” about considering the need for church buildings.

We see churches and houses of worship as ex­tensions of ourselves and reflections of our beliefs. To people who come upon them, “they are evan­gelizing in themselves,” Deacon Cummings said.

The rituals that occur in them are likewise “es­sential to all of us. We are ritual animals.”

“People who don’t observe them (our rituals) are deviant,” he said with a chuckle.

He cited the example of his daughter-in-law, a native of Poland, whose cultural experience of the American holiday of Thanksgiving means con­suming fish.

“It seems to me to be some kind of mortal sin,” he said. “We as human beings are almost ritually obsessive compulsive.”

Turning serious again, Deacon Cummings added that “in these rituals, we find our identities being confirmed. They offer that telling of who I am to the next generation.”

Churches are designed to be different from the other structures around them.

“The building itself not only speaks of the ver­ticality of the divine,” Deacon
Cummings contin­ued, “it wraps itself around you (as if to say) we are here for everybody.”

“Maybe we feel in the silence of the building the embrace of God,” he added.

Images in that worship space can bring together the three “bodies of Christ,” he said. First, there is the image of the corporal body of Christ as the son of Mary, portrayed in statuary and glass. Second is the Eucharist, which is also the body of Christ. Finally, there is Christ alive in the community identified as the Church.

“You can’t separate them,” Deacon Cummings said. “They are intrinsically woven together.”

Deacon Cummings talked about the late Jesuit convert Father Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Father Hopkins spent a period of his life feel­ing spiritually lost and described himself as a “joke” and “a piece of broken pottery.” Yet, he also recognized himself as an “immortal diamond” because “I am all that Christ is.”

“That’s what we mean by being embodied in Christ,” said Deacon Cummings. “That’s what our Church is telling us.”

The elements in contemporary churches tell the same story, he added, with the baptismal font usually found at the entrance, to the prominent placement of the ambo where the readings are pro­claimed, to the altar, “the center of everything.”

Deacon Cummings told a story about the diffi­cult relationship he had with one of his daughters, especially during her teenage years. He deeply regretted his part in those difficulties, and wrong a long letter to her, now an adult, apologizing for his mistakes.

She wrote back to him to let him know that she had forgotten all about those moments, communi­cating to him how much she loved him.

So it is with God when we approach Him in the sacrament of reconciliation to confess our sins.

“God says, ‘Oh what a mess you are! But I have forgotten all about them.’”

“This is our big, wide, untidy and messy Catho­lic family,” Deacon Cummings said.