Something very interesting happened for me in a Catholic Basilica today.
My wife Michelle and I have been hitting the tourist sites in Barcelona this week. The city so far has lived up to my expectations of medieval streets and Art Nouveau design elements everywhere. One of the major attractions of the destination was my favourite architect, Antoní Gaudi- the strange and unusual organically driven artist from the turn of the last century. His richly coloured mosaics and concrete buildings are works that I’ve been admiring and sketching from since I was a kid. We visited Park Güell this morning, and then made our way to his enormous masterpiece of a design that is still under construction now, La Sagrada Família. We took a guided tour with a group of anglophones, of which the first hour was outside admiring the facade. It was impressive and interesting but not what had drawn me to the building in my books at home. As the gothic organ started (it plays for a few minutes every half hour), we headed inside as the winter sun was setting and illuminating the west wall of glass. I’m not usually an overly emotional person- for me, the world is a place to be analyzed and rationalized to make sense of it, and if you know me, you know that I am certainly not catholic or Christian. I was caught by surprise by a rush of emotion- I was close to tears, and very uncomfortable with that fact in a public place. I tried to get my shit together, with not much success. The interior of the church is incredibly tall, with columns of tree like forms that make up a forest of pillars that support the enormous spires and towers. The stained glass is incredible, and stripped away from the usual dogmatic imagery that is present in most ecclesiastical glass. It’s organized in colour families and completely non-representational. Most of the interior is the same- instead of the images of religion, Gaudi used the language of artists- colour, light, shape and form, in the purest way possible. It was an incredible and overwhelming sensation, especially with the pipe organ filling another of my senses. (Continued in comments)
