Going to church?

Ancient monument is the status of a notable place or thing that remains present in today's landscape of cultural meaning, despite no longer being actively in service as it was in use during its heyday. Examples are locations for past battles, recorded by historians or ones older than written records, or the traces of structures now in disuse and disrepair, like this picture of a religious center. But why visit ruins or seek faint traces of long ago people and events? What is the attraction and significance?

Some visitors might claim direct descent from the people of that long-ago place and time. Others might visit for education, according to the guidebook advice or in the course of a field trip led by one's teacher. Visitors with the most distant connections to the subject or event tied to the site could be seeking physical, tangible communication with the past, somehow knowing by direct perception a little more about that place or time.

In the case of a house of worship now-defunct, some might say that a place once sacred is always infused with righteous meaning. Others might take a technical perspective and say it has no roof or assigned spiritual leader, therefore it is no longer alive as a fully functioning church; possibly soon after its last worship service the site was deconsecrated, thus downgrading the edifice to ordinary building. Remembering that a church is a body of believers not a building, very likely the religious community was gone long before the building began to leak and decay. So why do visitors come here but not sight seeing at an active church?

This place could once have been the scene of intense belief, high aspirations, deep doubts or feelings of guilt, or fear of disapproval. Learning and preaching could have gone on at the same time as economic redistribution, medical and spiritual healing, and decision-making for project and services.  Plunder - sanctioned by rulers or the illegal kind, poaching of building materials or decorative elements, and simple vandalism combined with the annual cycle of weather events and seasonal pattern of damp, freeze-thaw forces, and flooding to render the site as we now see it.

The passage of time keeps the vivid, personal, or engaging side of the thing at a distance. Visitors from the year 2016 can wander and let themselves wonder at the thing and what it did, it stood for, it resulted in, and the conditions needed initially to bring the structure and its functions into being and then to sustain its vitality from one generation to the next. By contrast a visitor to a currently functioning house of worship can still wander to some extent and can still wonder how it came to be and continues year by year. But there is little or no distance between the visitor and those within the church. And without that (psychological /historical) distance, the visitor may be asked questions, or the visitors reverie may be contradicted by the interpretation of a church leader or lay member.  In other words, one may go to an ancient monument to discover something distant and to exercise imagination unfettered. At a modern religious center that is fully functional, the physical part is only a fraction of the complete entity, since the body of believers is the living church, not the bricks-and-mortar or the sermon podcast on offer, for example. For a visitor seeking a taste of yore and the free play of imagination there is nothing like a ruin. A religious place of our time lacks the necessary distance of time and the quiet absence of movement that allows one’s imagination to roam.