Twenty-first century religious lessons in architectural vernacular
The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, CA
For much of my life, I only liked old churches, those with historical detail. I swoon at triptychs painted by famed Baroque artists. Gothic flying buttresses, ornate stained glass, count me in.
My distaste for “newer” churches is predicated on the countless unattractive and soulless ones I’ve been in. Carpeted, blond wood, uninspiring. The suburban United States is full of them.
But when you encounter a modern church like The Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, CA, you realize that in the right hands, modern architectural vernacular can exquisitely imbue meaning and artfully express deep-held religious sentiments.
The Cathedral of Christ the Light was designed by Craig W. Hartman from the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Inspired by the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the white fusiform shape is immediately apparent as you enter and walk toward the sanctuary. That shape also harkens to the sails of a ship, a nod to Oakland’s location on the bay.
When you stand in the sanctuary with the afternoon sun filtering in, the prodigiousness of something bigger than yourself is undeniably palpable. The Oakland Tribune described Hartman's description of light: "The design allows light to filter in, reminiscent of how light filters through a canopy of tall redwood trees in a wooded glade.” And if you have ever been in a forest of redwoods, you know what it is to feel small among greatness.
Those wooden ribs that allow the sun to filter in also recall another creature of the sea, a whale, and the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale. Initially skeptical of his calling as a prophet, the Israelite Jonah tried to escape his ordained fate on a boat where he was unceremoniously swallowed by a whale. After dwelling in the whale’s belly for three days, he is vomited back on land and takes up his prophetic mission.
God knows best.
As the Most Rev. Allen H. Vigneron, Archbishop of Detroit noted at the cathedral’s dedication in 2008,
The Cathedral of Christ the Light says what every cathedral says in response to the question, "How do we dwell together with God," but it expresses this answer in the idiom of a California community perched on the Pacific Rim at the beginning of the twenty-first century… By using the most elemental of Earth's materials-water, stone, and wood-in a way that displays light in a mode that intensifies the splendor of its display, the cathedral is a microcosm of the world established by God in the genesis of the world.
When architecture can perfectly interpret the creative brief to construct a cathedral from local materials that embodies both the temporal and the spiritual realms with striking clarity—well, that is a truly spectacular church.