In a Church Foundation university, especially, the chapel cannot be merely a museum witnessing to a founding history. It is only as home to the presence of a living, worshipping community which believes, affirms, lives out and authenticates the Christian (Anglican) faith that it can fulfil its purpose. In this way it can ground and legitimate the presence of the Christian metanarrative in the University, giving the descriptor ‘Christian’ a meaningful reference point when used of the ethos, values or purposes of the university. The chapel community, therefore, fulfils a powerful symbolic and vicarious role that extends way beyond the size of the actual worshipping community. The significance of its life is more qualitative than quantitative.
A chapel should also be, hopefully at least, a building of architectural merit that speaks of beauty and otherness in the language of stones, wood and glass, curve, sweep and form. It should escape mere function and on any space utilisation survey show up as anomalously underused even when full. In such a way it witnesses to a transcendent beyond.
Yet it is not just the (worship) events that take place in a chapel that matter, as if these could equally well be located anywhere. Nor it is simply the architectural delights of the chapel that count. It is in the interaction between the life the chapel contains and its sheer physical presence that the chapel’s potency is discovered. A chapel is space interpreted so as to become sacred place, a process of meaning-making that parallels that whereby a house becomes home. In this living interpretation worship and physical context mutually interact to produce meaning. Such interpretation is not an added extra, external to and plonked onto reality; it renders reality accessible, capable of being experienced. It is this interpretive work that serves the purpose of a chapel as a place where God can be felt, where sanctuary can be found, where reflection is encouraged, where the soul encounters transcendence. It becomes, even for the occasional visitor, a place where ‘prayer has been (and is) valid’ (T S Elliot).
I have been struck over the years at how emotionally hard some people find crossing the threshold into a chapel which, given its potential just articulated, is more than a pity. This has led me to wonder how one improves accessibility to a sacred place, leading me to ponder the appeal of ruined abbeys to where visitors seem to flock without concern.
The appeal of a ruined abbey is more that a matter of beauty and aesthetics; its presence is qualitatively different from, say, a ruined castle. It certainly has to do with a sense of the numinous. And is not the abbey’s ability to speak of the transcendent enhanced precisely by its being opened up to creation so that the roof of sky and the floor of grass become part of the abbey? Might its appeal also lie in the lack of religion, or rather the soft echo of religion, like arriving in a space after the worship service is over but its resonance lingers?
Thinking now in a more overtly theological fashion, perhaps the ruined abbey stands for the fracturing of religion and its opening up to life. And this resonates powerfully with what the incarnate Jesus achieves as the ‘new temple’ (e.g. John 2:13-22). In him ritual effort is brought to an end as God becomes accessible as gift in and through creation. Unlike the temple, Jesus is never our construction or our work; he comes to complete us as gift.
So from this I conclude two things. First, one needs to work at the transparency of the chapel to the University, both literally perhaps through the use of glass, and metaphorically the by commissioning and use of student and staff art. The chapel can also be opened up, sensitively, to a myriad of uses: as a venue for music and dance; as a safe place for sensitive conversations; for appropriate (one-off) lectures; for film making. Secondly, while maintaining the integrity of worship there is opportunity to let go of some of the ritual trappings that can obscure meaning for the uninitiated, unless that is, with careful explanation, one wants to make a special feature of them for a particular purpose.
The chapel’s purpose is to speak of a different order of things. It provides a reconceptualisation of the nature of space and time. Mere geometric extension becomes meaningful place. Undifferentiated chronos becomes kairos. And religious striving becomes the gift of God’s accepting presence.
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