When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2: 1-4)

Today, on the feast of Pentecost, three members of our Anglican parish accepted a spontaneous invitation to say the Lord’s Prayer in their native, non-English languages: Zulu, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Hearing them speak, I melted.

I remember once singing bhajans (devotional songs) in an ashram in Bangalore, India. The bhajans were mainly from Indian (non-Christian) religious traditions, and had been carefully selected so that (liberally minded) members of other religions might sing them comfortably, too. The guru of the ashram said: “It's even better if you don’t know what the words mean - then your mind doesn't get too involved.”

Some might find this comparison (and these words of wisdom) rather suspect. Ultimately, I do like to know what the words I am singing or reciting actually mean. To some extent, I want to understand, agree to, consent to - or not - what is being said, or praised, or pledged etc. At that time in my life, however, it was such a liberation to give my overused thinking mind a break. To worship in a different sort of way, or language.

Consciousness is notoriously difficult to understand and research. For many centuries, Rene Descartes’s idea of the thinking subject - cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am” - held sway in mainstream Western thought.

But a growing body of neuroscience studies suggest the father of modern thought got it backward: the true foundation of consciousness isn’t thought, some scientists say—it’s feeling. A massive international study published in Nature late last month is further driving the theory forward...based on the team’s results, when a person becomes aware of something, the back of the brain seems to do the heavy lifting—not the frontal “thinking” regions. This echoes the theory long championed by neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio: that consciousness begins with bodily feelings like hunger, pain, pleasure, and stress. Recently, the Damasios published an update on embodied consciousness, arguing that feelings generate the experiencer-self (the “I”), fusing body and mind into awareness. Consciousness begins in the body. Thinking evolved later. (1)

Today, after a robust “mission impact” review process, our parish will begin reflecting on a number of areas of challenge, including how our church interior is laid out and organized. In a mission sense, tone matters. Or as young people say: '“the feels” matter. What sort of felt experience might we want to support - or not - when someone walks into our church for the first time, or when any of us, for that matter, turn up each week to worship and pray?

I hate pews. I find them dark, heavy and uncomfortable. My fantasy is that they were designed, like prisons, to perform certain political and social functions: to “order” a congregation in a certain way, to wall off people from connecting with each other, to make us all focus on and surrender to clerical authority, to reinforce a hierarchical model of God being ‘up there’ and ‘out there’. Yes, I know - lots of my stuff here.

Interestingly, in terms of the long history of the church, pews are a fairly recent addition (further fuelling my suspicion that they are a feudal remnant):

Seating in the naves of churches was practically unknown for many centuries, as worshippers normally stood during the liturgy as they do in Eastern Orthodox churches today, though sometimes there were stone ledges round the wall of a church or round the bases of arcade pillars. (2)

In England, seating didn’t come in until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In other words, Catholic liturgy has been conducted standing up (and, we imagine, wandering around, perhaps even dancing) much longer than sitting down (and being rooted to one spot, seat, or pew).

Sometimes, after communion, I deliberately take ‘the long way’ back to my seat, taking the opportunity to do a slow, mindful lap of the whole church - a pilgrimage in miniature - letting my body move, stretch, and take in the space.

From medieval times, seating has also been subject to other imprints of power: many pews were rented by families. Wealthy families often sat in their own “chantry chapel”, or, after the dissolution of chantries, “built specially imposing and sequestered pews with an excellent view of the pulpit.” (3)

Don’t get me started on pulpits.

At best, seating supports us to rest comfortably. At worst, it reduces our body’s opportunity to explore sacred space and conduct worship in other, more bodily (i.e. consciousness) friendly ways.

In Quaker settings, where I also worship, the space is arranged less hierarchically, with all seating facing the centre of the room. Although spontaneous movement, singing, dancing, mourning etc., is technically permitted (if the Spirit moves), my experience so far is that this never happens. People mostly sit or occasionally stand and speak. Which maybe completely fine, but isn’t the openness to deep stillness and free spirit-led worship that many early ‘quaking Quakers’ envisaged and practiced.

Perhaps spontaneous movement, singing etc. needs more supportive form, interest, and explicit permission than has evolved in modern liberal Quakerism. In the right context, a “programmed” Anglican service is more inviting of bodily spontaneity as it is more various in its service pattern and sensory appeal (interspersed moments of listening, looking, singing, speaking, moving, touching, eating, smelling), often more diverse in terms of the people attending, and, in the right church with the right leadership, can be more inclusive of those central dark agents of spontaneity, body, and spirit-life - children.

In our church, which has a contemplative ethos or charism, so long as they are moderately quiet and respectful, children are free to stand up and move. They are welcome to walk around the church, or even walk up into the sanctuary and stand beside the vicar as she celebrates communion. My nine year old daughter, who has a special gift for ‘free ministry’, sometimes stands at the very apex of the church, under the central stained glass window of Mary and the baby Jesus, with her arms stretched wide in an ‘embracing the world’/crucifixion pose, while the priest officiates between our daughter and the rest of us. She can hold this pose, which is her own invention, invented out of observation and context-appropriate, for many minutes at a time. Other times, she might appear beside the altar and spontaneously bless the host with this or that gesture. Once she took a glass of water up to the altar, when the elements were being taken up for communion, “because I love Jesus”. No one really knows what she’s going to do next. Surprisingly, or not, her movements and gestures often enhance and warm the service, as well as interest the congregation, and it only ever goes really badly on a few occasions, mostly involving the parish wheelchair.

In “liturgical churches”, children, priests, and altar servers have the greatest opportunity to move. In charismatic services, a greater range of movement and spontaneous bodily responses are accepted, and even encouraged. I once saw a man stand up and run around the outside of the church for some minutes!

Obviously, in almost every form of group life, not everything can be permitted or enjoyed. There are trade-offs.

Going forward, how might our church create an interior space, as well as a worshipping culture, where contemplative themes and values - opportunities for silence, stillness, rest, and beauty - might exist alongside, or within, opportunities for spontaneous, respectful movement and expression? What might our children bring to these conversations, too, provided that we remember to consult and include them?

As to the bigger question of how our heritage church (one of the oldest in Christchurch) might balance past and present, G.D.W. Randall, writing on (or against) pews in A New Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship (1986, p.433), offers the following advice:

There is no doubt that the oldest churches look better as they were intended, without any permanent nave seating at all, and where the seating in such a church is not historically or aesthetically important it would often bring new life to the building to replace it with simple stacking chairs which can be arranged as required for liturgical or compatible secular activities, and otherwise recreate the nave space which has been lost since the fifteenth century.

═══✿═══

Postscript with images:

For many years, pews have been replaced with modern seating in traditional churches to create more space, comfort and flexibility. The below image is of changes made to Holy Trinity, Lyttelton (now destroyed by earthquakes) that involved moving the altar forward and out of the railed sanctuary, removing the altar rails, pulpit, and choir stalls, and replacing the heavy rows of dark wooden pews with lighter, modern seats.

Note the use of the splendid brass corona to anchor and centre the altar in the 1974 edition. This corona was recovered from the rubble of the destroyed church and has been rehung in the new “St Saviour’s at Holy Trinity” Anglican church in Lyttleton.

Here it is all lit up and spectacular again:

What follows is a series of images from the Trinity Church Furniture website (click here to visit) that put images to Randall’s words and argument (above) that pews should be replaced with simple stacking chairs. Modern seating is used to create more space in the nave, or return space to the nave, and more clearly feature each building’s unique, historical ‘bones’.

The buildings are grand indeed - much grander and with more resources than my humble parish’s heritage church! - but the same design principles apply.

Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Miami:

Winchester Cathedral:

Bath Abbey before…

and after:

The trouble with the Trinity Church Furniture chairs is that they look so damn hard and uncomfortable!

St Luke’s-in-the-City, Christchurch (also sadly destroyed by earthquakes), managed to use comfortable (and affordable) modern seating that was also flexible for different arrangements, and that showcased the building itself by creating space.