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| Photo by Andy Stefansson. The dome of BC Place, Vancouver, May 12, 2017 |
The sound rolls out, billowing like a sail.
It has a fullness I have never heard. An expansiveness I have never felt.
It fills up the vast emptiness. It reaches up to the dome.
(Volume as a measure of sound; volume as a measure of space.)
The singer refers to the stadium as the “concrete temple.”*
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Why do we create immense spaces for our gods?
So they can be big. So we can be small.
So we can know that emptiness is just fullness with nothing in it;
holding space for the immanent.
* The singer quoted was Bono. (CTV News. May 13, 2017) The event was a concert by U2. It is not my intention in any way to equate either of the above (or any other celebrity) with god. But the "temple" comment sent me in the direction of the overscaled architecture we have created for our gods. I was always told that the huge cathedrals of Europe (and elsewhere) were built for the glory of god. Now I am thinking they were built just as much for the smallness and the vulnerability of humans.
