The Church Thing

Corpus Christi church is a modest building that yet looms over this middle class neighborhood and can be seen from almost anywhere. It's not a cathedral, but it has the function of a cathedral for this community.

Whenever I go by a church I think about when it was built, why it was built, what it was used for some time ago, and what it is used for now. Many of the bigger, grander churches in the big cities are now museums or concert halls.

Churches are bookmarks in the history of human consciousness. They represent a developmental moment. They are treatments for existential trauma. And so they are in the process of being outgrown.

Existential trauma is that interior woundedness that humans have due to the general scariness of existence in our physical bodies. Some say that the woundedness comes from “harsh child rearing practices”. But harsh child rearing practices come from the need to survive in incredibly harsh environments, including the uncertainty of food, the shortage of shelter, the onslaught of disease, the dangers from implacably violent enemies.

In the very early stages of trauma treatment, the first step is to give a sedative. You need to calm the shattered consciousness, or else the patient will die of anaphalactic shock, let alone have the emotional equilibrium needed to work productively.

So, historically, churches are good and necessary medicine, akin to emergency room sedatives. Consider that the first cathedrals in Europe were built in the seventh century, and the great ones were not built until 500-600 years later. They were houses of emotional refuge for unspeakably terrified. populations.

However, slowly, very slowly, over the centuries homo sapiens has improved its situation. Commerce had a hand in this. Knowledge had a hand in it. Science is a relatively recent development in knowledge. Technology has a role. And all these achievements, bit by bit, have reduced the level of fear that humans have about their physical existence.

But it has been a painfully slow process. And at the present moment, although some parts of the human race have greatly reduced their fear of their condition, those parts are a small minority of human beings as a whole.

To me, churches are drugs I don't take any more. I used to take them. I was a really stressed-out kid. But now these drugs make me feel drugged.

So, whenever I go by a church, I am reminded of how much work is left to do to recover our full enjoyment of human existence.

An interesting footnote is that one of the big moments in the decline of churches was Martin Luther's opposition in 1517 to the selling of indulgences promoted by Pope Leo X in order to pay for the building of one of the great hypnotic achievements in architecture, St. Peter's basilica in Rome. (Of course Protestants continued to build churches, cathedrals even, but nothing as imposing as the structures of earlier Christianity.)

So, here we are, not finished with our emotional development yet. And commerce, medicine and technology cannot complete that process. To become fully secure in our existence we need to make friends with ourselves. Start sitting.