baptismal font

Historical and Theological Perspectives on the Baptismal Font

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The placement and appearance of the baptismal font has been the subject of many debates throughout the history of the church. This article traces many of these discussions and offers suggestions for current practice.

Questions about the scale and location, the symbolism and importance, of the baptismal font, indeed about the relationship of baptismal washing to initiation, are crucial to our generation. The issues are so complicated, however, that some parishes are refusing to decide about the location of fonts and are building churches without them. Many other churches have abandoned permanent fonts in favor of stainless steel basins, plastic bassinets, or glass punch bowls.

The contemporary practice seems to be repeating that of the middle decades of the sixteenth century when reformers abandoned the abuses and popery of Rome in order to create places and rites that would focus on fundamentals: the assembly gathered around the candidate. The reformers set aside all else—no salt, no blowing in the ears, no oil, no candle, no clothing, and sometimes, as with the Anabaptists, no water at all—hoping to find the fundamental meaning of this sacrament, which all agreed was given by mandate of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The search is an emotional one. We argue about the font because we know that as baptism captures our identity, so it becomes a symbol of our struggle for the church’s survival in this age. Not only is this notion appropriate but also it is in keeping with the history of baptism. No place has been so layered with meaning, so laden with iconography, as the place of baptism. No archaeological remains have been more consistently in evidence than the font. Even when the church’s worship took place in private Roman houses, the baptisteries were clearly set apart. No table, no reading stand, no presidential chair, no plate, no cup, no cross survives that period. But the font was already rich in iconography.

Patristic Sources

We will better understand the place of the font in contemporary church architecture if we begin with a review of the primary sources, the Patristic literature concerning the baptismal washing, especially the baptismal literature dating from the second century. This information exists in three forms: Christian apologetics, ritual descriptions and texts, and homilies or catecheses.

We often operate with two assumptions about the first centuries of the church: first, that the various churches throughout the empire held the same beliefs and celebrated the sacraments in the same way; and second, that the era was primitive and therefore theologically undeveloped. Both assumptions are false. Churches in the first four centuries witnessed active research in biblical and philosophical sources. There were theological debates between Christians and political and religious discussions among Christians and Gnostics and others. There were theological and practical differences between the East and West—even in the way they kept their calendars. All of these factors yielded a rich matrix for baptism.

The word baptism comes from the Greek baptizein, meaning “to dip repeatedly.” The sacrament that we refer to as baptism was at first called “enlightenment,” as we read in the writings of Justin (c. 160). Baptism was called enlightenment because it bestows the fire of the indwelling Word, the pillar of light, Christ, who scattered the darkness and spread the light of truth. It was also understood as initiation, a term for the process of becoming a member of the community. If one considers the process as initiation, then the act of baptizing, though meaningful in itself, is part of a broader constellation of rites.

Although the word baptistery does not occur until 350 in the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem (Mystagogical Catechesis I), archaeology has shown us that baptisteries existed as early as 235, for example, at the Roman house church in Dura-Europos. To consider these sources as evidence of universal practice, however, would be a mistake. That a wide variety of practices continued long after fonts were in use suggests, perhaps, that neither the place of a font nor its specific qualities are as important as the water and the action of washing.

The Didache, written in the early second century, represents Syrian practice. It is concerned with the qualities necessary for the water; namely, that it be cold (or at least not hot) running water. Practically speaking, these requirements eliminate the cistern in favor of either a fountain or a bath with living water. Justin, writing from Rome in 160, says that there must be enough water at baptism so that one can be washed. Hippolytus, also writing from Rome in 215, requires that the water be pure and flowing.

Tertullian, writing from North Africa after 195, approaches the matter more boldly, by saying that all water is made sacred by invoking God. For him, the waters of baptism become the waters of creation, pure and aboriginal. The Acts of Judas Thomas, written in Edessa, now Turkey, describes the baptism of Gundaphorus at a Roman bathhouse in the third century. (The bathhouse was closed for preparation seven days before the baptism.) The same source describes the baptism of Mygdonia at a fountain. Finally, the History of John, Son of Zebedee, written in 350 in Caesarea, has the most elaborate architectural setting for the act of washing. The baptism of Tyrannus takes place in the theater at Ephesus in a specially constructed cistern 22 inches deep.

The earliest literature does not conclude absolutely that a font is needed. Water is water, and almost any water is appropriate. But how does the water get its meaning? If fountains, amphitheaters, and Roman baths are all acceptable, is there anything in Patristic literature that makes water a symbol all to itself? Is it a sacred object?

Blessing the Water

If specific legislation required the use of fonts, then perhaps we could say that water is, in and of itself, a sacred object. There is no such text, however, and yet the water is meaningful. Its identity comes from two sources that are deeply interdependent: texts of blessing and theological descriptions of washing. And we know that once a blessing is proclaimed, no earthly matter may pollute it. It is simply pure.

As the Patristic age developed, references to a blessing of the water became more numerous. Neither the Didache nor Justin mentioned a blessing over the water. Hippolytus referred to such a prayer, but he did not describe it. Finally, Tertullian (in North Africa, c. 195) called it an invocation of God that brings the spirit upon the waters. Thus, the act of washing is the spirit washing, and the waters become the waters of creation.

Texts of blessing begin to appear about 350, in Serapion and Ambrose, for example, but also in the Syrian text of the History of John, Son of Zebedee. In the Syrian text, the scene is set in the large amphitheater in Ephesus, with the priests of Diana deserting the white marble temple for a newfound Christian faith. As the sun sets, they step forward, cutting a line across the open edge of the theater. John, the presbyter, calls down the Spirit of God on the improvised font, saying:

Glory to you, Father, Son, and Spirit of holiness, forever. Amen. Lord God Almighty, let your Spirit of holiness come and rest upon the oil and upon the water. Let these people be bathed and purified from uncleanliness; let them receive the Spirit of holiness through baptism. Yes, Lord, sanctify this water with your voice, which resounded over the Jordan and pointed out our Lord Jesus, saying, “This is my beloved Son.” Yea, I beseech you, Lord, manifest yourself here before the assembly who have believed in you.

After these words, fire blazed over the oil, and John took the priests of Artemis and washed them clean, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Then bread and wine were brought forward.

This text opens many horizons for us. Its focus is not on the water and the oil per se, but on the effects of the acts of washing and anointing. Nevertheless, it is the water and the oil that is made, that is, identified. Moreover, the whole washing is public, which is not the case in our other sources; and finally, the washing relates to the ritual actions before and after it, especially to the Eucharist that follows the washing.

The basic meaning of the baptismal water in the History of John is that of a bath of purification and a gift of holiness. This view of redemption is as appropriate for the city of Ephesus as it was for the apostle Paul. The primary biblical type is the baptism of repentance and faith given by John at the Jordan.

This is not, however, the only identity given to the water in the Patristic sources. Theodore of Mopsuestia, speaking for the Church of Antioch in the fifth century, describes the blessing as an invitation to the spirit to give the water power of conceiving and becoming the womb of sacramental birth. This is a typical Johannine creation image and the second major interpretation of the act of washing: to be baptized is to be made new in the waters of rebirth.

We think of Adam, like Christ, asleep in the garden that God has made. In his sleep, Eve is begotten as bride and newborn, a child fed by Adam’s flesh and blood. Together, Adam and Eve are companions just as Christ and the church begotten in Christ’s flesh and blood are companions. This image describes a new beginning, gentle and fresh. It is the opening of one’s eyes to new creation and seeing the hand of God still smeared with the earth from which we came.

Creation, destruction, and new creation, sin, and death, forgiveness and resurrection, converge on the cross and death, burial and resurrection of the new Adam, Jesus Christ. These two approaches to the water are a convergence of Pauline soteriology and Johannine eschatology. Together, they describe the soul of the water.

The Act of Washing

After the blessing texts come descriptions of the act of washing. They are remarkably similar in the writings of Cyril, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Theodore. After the catechumenate, the season of Lent and election, scrutinies and exorcisms, the rite at the font takes place. First, those to be baptized stand in an outer darkened chamber, symbolizing renunciation of the past. They face the west, the night, sin and death, and Satan; and they disavow them. They undress, and their whole bodies are anointed with rich oil.

Second, they are led gleaming to the pool and in the shimmering light of lamps, confess the faith and are led into the font step by step. There, guided by the hand of the deaconess or deacon, they are plunged into the dark cold waters and emerge three times. This is accompanied by a formula of baptism. They are then led out of the pool, anointed, touched, kissed, and fed.

What happens in this baptismal act is precisely what the prayer over the water invoked: a candidate is changed into Christ the crucified one and the new Adam. He or she is born again or transubstantiated.

Although the washing and anointing were pivotal points in the initiation process, they were not absolute. If death should come before the water, the catechumen or elect was still buried as a Christian. Further, to die as a witness to Christ replaced the baptismal washing absolutely, for martyrs are washed clean in the blood of the Lamb.

These texts for the blessing of water and the description of the rite were soon translated into architectural forms and images that we must now explore.

The Iconography of Fonts

Fonts in the East and the West had three similarities: they were essentially shallow baths, built for adults, and located in special rooms. In fact the Constantinian church plan was an assembly of rooms set aside for a variety of purposes.

The size of the fonts varied greatly. The smallest was 96 centimeters wide by 1 meter and 61 centimeters long; the largest, located at St. John Lateran, was 8 meters wide (approximately 25 feet across). The general depths were between 50 and 65 centimeters, about 24 inches. One font in Greece, however, was a full meter deep. No font seems to have been deep enough for total submersion, which means that the act of washing was an immersion.

The basic character of the fonts as baptismal baths is the primary and anthropological iconography of the font. The bath signifies a ritual place of washing, not because one is soiled but because one descends into the font having one identity and ascends from it with another. This datum is transcultural and archetypal; it is just as true of Qumran, the Ganges River, and the Taurobolion of Methra.

There is also a basic religious iconography associated with the decoration of fonts, which is what makes them Christian places of washing. The iconography of the fonts corresponds to the known prayers of blessing and popular homilies. Those prayers and homilies explored the passages concerned with water in the Hebrew Bible and applied them as parallels to the Jesus event. The recurring images are primarily concerned with creation, redemption, and purification.

Images of Creation

In general, the creation typology is prevalent in the Eastern church, which celebrated initiation at Epiphany. Redemption typology was preferred in Roman circles. The West celebrated initiation at the Paschal vigil or Pentecost. Purification typology is found in the East and the West, in Orthodox and Arian churches.

The creation typology makes baptism an act of returning to the origins of the earth. Because the font is the place of new creation, images of Christ’s incarnation are the demarcation point. Creation is glorified in the event and evil overcome. The new creation imagery is drawn from nature. Some of the specific images are taken from the Psalms, but other biblical sources are also apparent. Among these images are peacocks (as symbols of eternity); deer (slaying snakes and slaking their thirst); fruit trees, as in the Garden of Eden; the four rivers of Eden; Adam and Eve; stars (as a symbol of creation and of the covenant with Abraham); birds; and a baldachin or apse to symbolize the vault of heaven.

The creation typology prefers the circular font as a sign of new creation and birth, thus also affirming the long tradition of the circle as the symbol of fullness.

These creation images are found on many tombs, such as the Galla Placidia in Ravenna. Many churches also have a similar iconography.

Images of Redemption

The redemption typology takes its imagery from the cross of Christ and his entombment. The shapes of the fonts are often quadrilateral or even cruciform. Three steps lead into the font and three out of it so that the neophyte’s descent into the water parallels the three days Jesus spent in the tomb. Cardinal Danielou describes the descent into the font as a seven-step process. Three steps are taken in the name of the Trinity, and three represent the time in the tomb. The seventh step, the step out of the font, is the Sabbath rest God took at the completion of creation.

The deluge, Noah and the Ark, the dove, and the eight survivors of the flood also contribute to the redemption imagery. The number eight plays an important part: not only were there eight survivors for the new world, but also it was the eighth day, the day after the Sabbath, that Jesus chose to inaugurate the new era. This eschatology is clearly found in the eight-sided fonts in Hagia Sophia and St. John Lateran. The symbolism of eight sides also relates to the creation typology.

The six-sided font is also an image of redemption, for it represents the sixth day, the day of Jesus’ death, and the day God created man and woman. Further redemption images are the harrowing of hell, the crossing of the Red Sea, the slaying of the leviathan, the apocalyptic image of the throne, and the glorified cross.

Each image suggests a new era begotten in the waters of death and ushering in the last days. All that is evil has been overcome in the triumph of the cross. Satan flees, and all the heavenly hosts fill the sky with hosannas, for the Lord is risen and the people are set free as in the great Exodus.

Images of Purification

The third source of icons associated with baptism celebrates a purification typology. This imagery, crossing all architectural settings, is focused primarily on John’s baptism of Christ in the Jordan, a baptism of repentance and faith. To this scene are added the purification of Joshua coming through the Jordan as he enters the chosen land and Elijah who passes through the waters of Jordan before he is taken up in the fiery chariot. We also see this symbolism in the purification of Naaman, the leper, who is washed clean in the Jordan. At Ravenna there are two primary fonts with the Jordan scene, the Arian baptistery, and the Orthodox baptistery.

Guidelines for Our Practice

The architectural decoration of ancient fonts is an explicit iconography; it places the fonts within an intelligible framework. We must do more, however, than simply repeat the three sets of images. We must also try to retrieve the primary symbols. Thus, the baptismal bath is much more significant to us than the slaying of the leviathan. As authentic as the multiple images of creation, redemption, and purification are, they should be subordinate to the anthropological images of the bath and descent into the font. This is what the ancient church really cared about, the essential meaning of the font.

With one eye on the authenticity of the ancient experience and another on today’s needs, we can draw out a few basic guidelines for our efforts to revitalize our baptismal practice.

First, it is the act of washing, not just water, that carries meaning. We have tended to theologize symbols rather than experience them, in part because we accepted the Patristic era’s typology, but not its anthropology. The Patristic period was marked by the process of doing rather than the static realism that makes objects sacred apart from the rites that give them birth and sustain them. The act of washing, not water as pure symbol, is the bearer of meaning.

Second, we should look upon the washing as a public action focused on the individual. When the Roman church started celebrating baptism privately, the font became a symbolic “door to the sacraments” rather than a place of ritual action. The sixteenth-century reformers abandoned the locked basin at the entry in favor of simple bowls placed on or near the altar, thus permitting the presence of the assembly as a witness to God’s grace. So if we begin to look at the place of baptismal washing as a place of dynamic ritual and assembly, we will be appropriating the valid insights of the reformers.

Third, the act of washing should be seen in a wider constellation of rites, especially anointing and Eucharist. With the initiation rites of 1969 and 1972 dealing with the baptism of infants and adults, the Roman liturgy has once again placed baptism in its broadest ritual context. This emphasis on process and a wider constellation of rites comprising the sacrament of initiation stems from a Patristic theology that sees the bath as a generous gift of God. This could mean a balance between works and grace, or between process and gift.

Fourth, the shape, depth, and iconography of the font should support a basic theological understanding, namely that the act of washing is based on the full adult experience. When infants became the primary candidates for baptism, architecture responded to the practice and began to raise the fonts from the basins that sat on the floor to containers on pedestals because they were more convenient. In the Patristic literature, fonts are places of water that can be entered, places in which the adult’s coming to faith is the paradigm. Respecting this insight will call for dramatic changes in the architectural setting for baptism. Fonts will become baptismal pools rather than pieces of furniture.

Fifth, and finally, we must consider the location of the font. As I mentioned earlier, the Patristic period developed fonts in specially designed rooms. Today the location of the font is necessarily in a place of assembly, to accommodate our new awareness of the community’s role. We must look, therefore, for a public place. The two locations most frequently used are the sanctuary and the entry. I feel, however, that neither of these is the best solution to the problem.

If ritual is something to engage in and not simply to watch, we have a principle for locating the font apart from the sanctuary as it is presently conceived. Further, if the endpoint of worship is the Table, we have a principle for maintaining the stational character of the Patristic period. While this may not imply a separate room, it does require a separation. As for the second image of the baptismal font as “the door to the sacraments,” a font in the entry tends to eliminate totally the public character of the washing. Unless the entry allows for total community assembly, we have a symbol without a function. It is clear that we need deeper experiences of community ritual to reveal to us the best location for baptism “in the midst” of the assembly.

The Patristic evidence has silhouetted the wrong turns we have made in the past; it challenges us to probe the issue of the font as symbol of our identity. Most of all it calls us to move our focus from status symbols to process within community. The whole process of initiation is an interaction between individuals coming to the assembly and the assembly’s dialogue with these persons. The font and all the other symbols—words, gestures, objects, places—serve that holy process through which God comes to life in our love for one another.

Questions to Ask about Your Worship Space

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This article asks the kinds of questions that force congregations to think about the power of their worship space to form worship that is faithful to the gospel and meaningful to all participants. The questions are asked in light of the Reformed tradition, but can be modified to reflect the specific theological commitments of any given worshiping community.

The sanctuary is the setting for most corporate worship experiences. Either by design or by interest, the worship committee often finds itself involved in the custodial concerns and mechanics of presenting meaningful worship in that space. While mechanical concerns are not to be ignored, theological messages presented by the setting need to receive attention as well. The worship committee can be the bridge between the congregation’s level of understanding of worship and the clergy’s role in utilizing the symbolic in response and instruction.

Take time to look objectively at your worship setting. Do the furnishings and architecture and symbols represent your congregation’s theology of worship? Do they tell a faith story or reflect socioeconomic values? Does the building focus on God, or has the building become the thing that we worship?

The Room. What message is communicated by the room itself? Does it generate a sense of awe or a sense of community? Do you want it to be a place for responding in worship—or a place for observing worship? What can be done to make a tiny church feel awe-filled? What can a large worship space do to provide a setting for “community”? Does the church with movable seating communicate an active, alive faith, or careless disregard for tradition? Most of all, is what you see in your sanctuary consistent with the theology of worship?

The Pulpit. Where is the pulpit located? Is the clergy “removed from” or “among” the people? Does its placement say what you believe about the relationship of clergy and laity?

The Table. Is it clear that the Lord’s Table is a table and not an altar? Is the Table intentionally placed either “removed from” or “among” the people? Would there be a powerful message in changing its location on some occasion? Does the congregation understand the symbolism of whatever arrangement or placement you are utilizing or tolerating?

The Baptismal Font. Where is your baptismal font or bowl located? Calvin would have placed it near the pulpit (the Word) and the Lord’s Table to indicate the unity of the three. Some of us, on the other hand, have begun to appreciate the placement of the font by the entrance to the sanctuary as symbolic of baptism as an entrance rite into the life of the church. What can be communicated if the baptismal font or bowl is very small or usually stored in a cupboard in the kitchen?

Other Visual Symbols. Are your symbols, including the cross, selected and placed with an eye to the message? Are the symbols, especially banners, ever changed, changed seasonally, weekly, or only when convenient? Have memorial gifts distorted the faith story? What is the value of floral arrangements? Can they enhance the liturgical year in addition to reflecting the seasons of the calendar? Does the lighting of a candle or candles, especially a paschal candle, have symbolic value in your congregation or is the lighting a housekeeping matter understood only by clergy?

Recently I heard of a church building program in which every design decision was made with an eye to its potential value for teaching and experiencing the faith. I also visited a sanctuary in which the baptismal font was padlocked and the chancel cross so small as to be nearly imperceptible. I am curious what a caring worship committee might do with each of these “problems.” In the first case, the power of the theology of the building and furnishings cannot be sustained if the symbols are neither taught nor space utilized consistently with their understanding. In the case of the second church, it is necessary to recognize the power of symbols for everyone in order to correct the messages now being communicated unintentionally. In careful planning of new worship space, the potential for empowering or at least stimulating the congregation by design and furnishing is immense. But the constraints of the already-designed or misdesigned facility require even more of the committee if the building is to say what we believe.

It is God that empowers our faith journey, but the use of the space has the power to detract or enhance the journey. The issues will not produce ultimately the right answers but will assist the faithful in understanding. We must take worship seriously enough to not miss opportunities to teach the faith and to carefully call it out in all that we do.

The Church Building as a Setting for Liturgical Action

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The following comments discuss the relationship of the design of the worship space to the actions that take place there. The function and significance of these actions provide the needed guidelines for liturgical architecture.

The church building and setting for the liturgical assembly. Nothing more, but nothing less. Liturgical worship happens in space, and space is shaped into place by the meaning people discover within it. Jews and Christians have shaped space into place by discovering that the Creator abides throughout creation. Christians especially can never forget the spatial concreteness the Incarnation entails. God did not become a movement, a concept, an ideal, or even a committee, but a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a country, a home. He inhabited not just a time but places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all. The memory of this has never died because his continuing presence by grace, faith, and sacrament still does the same in the world through his body, which is the church, enfleshed locally in the liturgical assembly.

It goes counter to Christian instinct, therefore, that the place in which the church assembles should be devoid of all evidence of his presence or that this presence should be regarded as temporary, capricious, or discrete so as not to restrict him or inconvenience the assembly. He restricted himself by becoming incarnate, and the assembly’s only inconvenience is his real absence.

Raw space becomes liturgical place through the change his presence by grace, faith, and sacrament causes. Liturgical place is thus not a monument to the pastor’s tastes or the locale in which the assembly feels most comfortable. Jesus Christ’s incarnate presence caused notable discomfort even for those who loved him best, and he is reported to have resorted to violence on one occasion when faced with the obduracy of the temple clergy’s tastes. Liturgical place belongs to the assembly only because the space it occupies is first his. He alone makes it a place by specifying its meaning as distinct from all others. To this specification the assembly can only be obedient; for it the assembly can only pray even as it cooperates with him by faith in its specification.

What the church building shelters and gives setting for is the faithful assembly, the church, in all its rich diversity of orders from catechumen to penitent, from youngest server to eldest bishop. As it meets for worship of the Source and Redeemer of all, the assembly is the fundamental sacrament of God’s pleasure in Christ on earth. The eucharistic food and drink are the sacred symbol of this ecclesial reality, which Paul calls simply Christ’s body. Christian instinct has been to house this assembly as elegantly as possible, avoiding tents, bedrooms, and school basements.

The assembly uses its place to do something in. This is the liturgy, by which the assembly celebrates the nuptials of all things with their Creator. Because the celebration outstrips being merely an instruction, a pageant, a meditation, a preachment, or an act of therapy, the assembly, as a rule, has kept its place open for movement on the part of all. Furniture is used for a public purpose and for those who find it difficult to stand or move.

The strong and elemental openness of liturgical place makes for dynamism and interest. It is a vigorous arena for conducting public business in which petitions are heard, contracts entered into, relationships witnessed, orations declaimed, initiations consummated, vows taken, authority exercised, laws promulgated, images venerated, values affirmed, banquets attended, votes cast, the dead waked, the Word deliberated, and parades cheered. It is acoustically sonorous, rarely vacant of sound or motion. It possesses a certain disciplined self-confidence as the center of community life both sacred and secular. It is the Italian piazza, the Roman forum, the Yankee town green, Red Square moved under roof and used for the business of faith. It is not a carpeted bedroom where faith may recline privately with the Sunday papers.

Find the most serviceable places for the altar, font, and chair and leave them there. Altars on wheels, fonts that collapse, and presidential chairs that fold away do not free but neuter liturgical place. Since crucial values are perennial rather than disposable, they flock with usage to sustained focal points and thus help to reduce raw space into human place. Crucial values so incarnated become roots for people’s lives. Gymnasia rarely play a profound role in most people’s maintenance of a secure identity.

Altar and font normally should be fixed, elemental, and powerful in their simplicity, free-standing to allow access from all sides, and worthy of the assembly that surrounds them. The amount of space surrounding each should be scaled to the size of the assembly. Neither altar nor font should be so close to the other as to compete for attention or to confuse each other’s purpose, dignity, and quite different kinds of liturgy. The altar is a Table to dine upon. The font is a pool to bathe in, a womb to be born from, a tomb to be buried in. Bathing and dining areas are rarely found in the same room, except in churches.

The presidential chair should be modest but not trivial. It is best located not primarily in reference to the altar but to the assembly, perhaps in an open area in the nave of the church facing both the lectern and altar along with the rest of the assembly. This would shift the ceremonial focus of the liturgy, except for the eucharistic prayer, into the midst of the assembly itself, where it seems to belong given the nature of Christian worship. Outside baptism and the eucharistic banquet, the form this worship normally takes is that of a liturgy of the Word in which the Word is heard and responded to by the whole assembly, ministers included. Locating the ministerial area and the president’s chair in the midst of the assembly may thus be the most versatile arrangement.

As the name implies, the lectern is a reading stand rather than a shrine competing with font and altar. The shrine of the gospel book is the altar. The shrine of the gospel itself is the life of the faithful assembly that celebrates the Word liturgically. The gospel book, which is “sacramental” of all this, is constantly in motion, being carried, held, opened, read from, closed, and laid rather than left somewhere behind votive lights or under lock and key.

The altar and the baptismal font are the primary spatial foci of the liturgy. The altar Table is kept free of contraptions such as elaborate bookstands, pots, cruets, plastic things, electrical apparatus, aids to piety, and the efforts of floral decorators. The book of the Word and the sacrament of the Word are adornment enough.

The baptismal area is kept free of rumpled vestments, cotton wads, stacks of reading material, and folding chairs. The pool itself is kept clean. It contains what is called “living water” not because things grow in it but because it moves to give life to those who lie in death’s bonds.

Liturgical things are designed for the assembly’s purpose. The church building houses the assembly. It is neither a museum for ecclesiastical art nor a pious attic. All it contains should possess a sober splendor congruent with the assembly and its sacred intent.

Bread and wine should be just that, not plastic disks and grape juice, not corn chips and lemonade. The assembly uses bread and wine as food and drink in the Eucharist. These should be present in form, quality, and quantity to correspond with a banquet’s usual liberality, keeping in mind, however, that this banquet’s purpose is not to fill bellies but to give thanks to the Source and Redeemer of all things. The Eucharist, like the Supper that remains its prototype, fills one with more than food, rejoices hearts with more than wine.

Cups, plates, flagons, and bread boxes should be ample. Cluttering the altar with many small cups is logistically and symbolically inelegant. Use one cup of some significance together with a clear glass or crystal flagon large enough to fill smaller cups for Communion later. The same principle holds for the bread plate: Use a single large one from which bread can be transferred to smaller plates for Communion later. The Eucharist that becomes a fast-food operation might be compared to a baptism that proceeds from eye-droppers or aerosol cans.

Vestments are sacred garments rather than costumes or billboards. They are meant to designate certain ministers in their liturgical function by clothing creatures in beauty. Their symbolic strength comes not from their decoration but from their texture, form, and color. The basic vestment of major ministers is the stole, which bishops and presbyters wear around the neck and deacons wear over the left shoulder. No other ministers wear stoles in the Roman Rite. Ministers ordained to lesser orders may wear albs. When laypersons carry out liturgical duties it is more fitting that they wear their own clothes as members of the assembly, which is no mean dignity in itself. Dalmatic, chasuble, cope, and miter can be handsome garments and should be worn as complements to the assembly whose purpose at worship is never merely utilitarian but festive.

Books are means rather than ends. Even so, they should be worthy of the Word they record and of those among whom the Word has taken flesh.

Good images are neither accidents nor fantasies but knowledgeable accomplishments that go beyond what can be observed either now or in time past. As John Meagher says, they are meant to evoke the presence of mysteries the mind has glimpsed, to remind us of the ancestral heritage of worship, to tease us out of mere thought lest we forget that history does not fence in truth, that we may not substitute critical understanding for reverence, that our knowledge is not so complete or accomplished as we often assume, and above all that our memories mix with our longings and our joys to put us in touch with our deepest sense of home.

Churches are not carpeted. While rugs and runners may occasionally enhance liturgical place by adding festal color, carpeting in quantity wearies the eye and muffles sound. Even with a good electronic sound system, which is a rarity, a carpeted church often has all the acoustical vigor of an elevator. The ambiance of a carpeted church, moreover, is too soft for the liturgy, which needs hardness, sonority, and a certain bracing discomfort, much like the Gospel itself. Liturgical ambiance must challenge, for one comes to the liturgy to transact the public business of death and life rather than to be tucked in with fables and featherpuffs. The liturgy challenges what Quentin Crisp calls the general notion of Christianity as a consolatory religion, as something nice that Jesus of Nazareth could say to those who turn to him for comfort.

Furniture is significant and kept to a minimum. Pews, which entered liturgical place only recently, nail the assembly down, proclaiming that the liturgy is not a common action but a preachment perpetuated upon the seated, an ecclesiastical opera done by virtuosi for a paying audience. Pews distance the congregation, disenfranchise the faithful, and rend the assembly. Filling a church with immoveable pews is similar to placing bleachers directly on a basketball court: It not only interferes with movement but changes the event into something entirely different. Pews are never mentioned in Roman rubrics, nor is there any record that being without pews has ever killed Christians in significant numbers.

Banners are decorative images, not ideological broadsides or opportunities for tricky piety. Rather than a festal gesture for the assembly, banners often are a form of disposable ecclesiastical art bearing disposable thoughts which foster disposable piety. Such banners should be disposed of.