Up and Up
Maybe if I had grown up around here, I would be more religious; in any case, it’s clear that lots of painters, architects, and ticket-takers have had a much more vital experience of one particular version of a higher power than I ever have.
I mean, for instance, this morning we made it to the famed Familia Sagrada church in time to beat the worst of the crowds and rode the elevator to the top of one of the completed spires. Each of us felt, if not some sort of religious epiphany, at least that tickly feeling in your belly as you gaze out and down over the city from way up. Maybe this doesn’t mean that you’re actually closer to God, but you can imagine how it might feel if that were the vocabulary you had been surrounded with all your life.
Still, I kept thinking that there had to be more about all this ascension than merely capturing it on film, which seemed to be the dominant mode of expression for nearly everyone there, especially those wearing shorts.
But there’s high and there’s high: and what made me almost believe in a supreme being—or, at least, kinda wish I was Catholic—was our visit in the evening to Tibado, the highest of the hills in Barcelona, upon the top of which sits a church whose topmost top you can ascend to and command a panoramic view of the entire city and miles beyond to the sea and mountains such that you really can believe that all of this including the human spirit to create can’t simply have sprung into existence for no reason whatsoever and then a bit later, when we were circling in the 1928 airplane ride at the amusement park and after thunder and lightning, a rainbow emerged over the city, it took practically all of my secular humanist impulses to remind me that high as we were, there’s still nothing higher.
I mean, for instance, this morning we made it to the famed Familia Sagrada church in time to beat the worst of the crowds and rode the elevator to the top of one of the completed spires. Each of us felt, if not some sort of religious epiphany, at least that tickly feeling in your belly as you gaze out and down over the city from way up. Maybe this doesn’t mean that you’re actually closer to God, but you can imagine how it might feel if that were the vocabulary you had been surrounded with all your life.
Still, I kept thinking that there had to be more about all this ascension than merely capturing it on film, which seemed to be the dominant mode of expression for nearly everyone there, especially those wearing shorts.
But there’s high and there’s high: and what made me almost believe in a supreme being—or, at least, kinda wish I was Catholic—was our visit in the evening to Tibado, the highest of the hills in Barcelona, upon the top of which sits a church whose topmost top you can ascend to and command a panoramic view of the entire city and miles beyond to the sea and mountains such that you really can believe that all of this including the human spirit to create can’t simply have sprung into existence for no reason whatsoever and then a bit later, when we were circling in the 1928 airplane ride at the amusement park and after thunder and lightning, a rainbow emerged over the city, it took practically all of my secular humanist impulses to remind me that high as we were, there’s still nothing higher.
posted by Professor Dave at 1:44 AM
1 Comments:
I liked peeping out the windows from the staircase when we were there in 2002; but I kept my secular humanist eyes fixed on other parts of the church, the city, and the scaffolding, since lots of Gaudi's chapel was being renovated - rather than the heavens.
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