Subletting in the House of God

by Erika Eichelberger

I was heading down Broadway in the East Village last week amid the all-too-familiar toxic cocktail of frazzled pedestrians, wailing sirens, ingratiating storefronts and jackhammer blasts, when I passed the sedate Grace Church. I decided to step in.

My first thought as I set my agnostic shoe inside the anteroom was that God was frowning on me. He was damning me to hell while blessing the single other chaste soul who was there piously praying. (How this is possible if I don’t believe in God, I don’t know. Christian horse camp at age nine wouldn’t be a bad guess.) If this was the House of God, then I felt like I was breaking and entering.

But then the cavernous beauty of the gothic architecture and the bigness of the silence calmed me. And so did the dim tranquility of the light filtering in, the cool patience of the carved columns, the stillness of the stained glass rose window that seemed to be cradling thousands of years in its luminous intricacies. Here was a place utterly cut off from the manic rush and headache just outside the heavy wooden doors. I hadn’t expected this: a feeling I usually associated with, maybe, looking out over oceans or snow-capped mountains.

I was reminded of attending church as a child, when I used to be a believer: when this beauty and silence was God, and church was indeed the house of God. But as I sat there, watching a few people trickle in and out reverently, I began to see it for what it was: a house of humans. This majestic creation, built as a tribute to God, was an inadvertent tribute to our own sad and beautiful existential dilemmas. It gave me a sense of perspective in the same way that the concept of God gives perspective to the faithful. I sat there for another half hour, transfixed by the stained glass, thinking nothing, feeling my muscles relax into the space around me.

I was surprised to find such an oasis in the midst of Gotham madness, but I was even more surprised to find it in a place I usually associate with its own kind of madness, which is indicative of how difficult it is for us secular folk to appropriate for ourselves what is truly beautiful about religion. We often hear that at their root, all religions are the same; they all place humans in the context of some greater interconnected reality of which we cannot conceive. But even deeper than non-affiliated spirituality, which still requires faith, religion at its very base reminds us of the importance of finding time in our day to think outside of our own narrow, harried agendas. Especially in this city, in which there is always so much to be done, it is easy to forget the importance of truly taking the time to just notice your breath and your heartbeat, acknowledge gratitude and pain, acknowledge existence. Put things in perspective a bit.

A little peace goes a long way.