Road from the Temple
Part 1. Once upon a time, keeping its vow, a community made a painstaking effort to build and dedicate to their God a majestic beautiful house. The community members often came to pray there. But soon after, a terrible typhoon tore off the roof, smashed the plain and stained-glass windows, and blew the people out into the street. God too abandoned that abode. And what is a house of God without God? Anything you like! First it became a barn, then a place of entertainment. Little by little, everybody forgot Who that house was built for.
Much time passed, and a new typhoon struck the place, but blew and raged in the opposite direction. All of a sudden the people remembered who had built such a beautiful house and the One to whom it was dedicated. What happened then was something like a modern miracle: those who built the house were allowed to reside there alongside God. A happy ending? It only seemed so. For it was clear very soon that the house turned into a notorious and unforgettable shared apartment of the first hurricane, where simultaneously the temple’s builders pray, their God dwells, the priests of mundane diversions hold sway, and their admirers have fun. All hinder one another like in a shared kitchen, all are embittered and disgruntled, all defend their own rights even in the absence of them, and all are engaged in endless and far-from-philosophical quarrels parading as debates. But the ungodly decision was made somewhere very high on quite a logical premise that today’s residents of the house live very well in good, if narrow, quarters.
As is clear to all and as it always happens, the common house remained without a master, there was nobody to take care of it, and it gradually began to fall into ruins. Yet, this alarms only the builders who constantly spot, much to their terror, new cracks in the walls and foundation, moisture in the basement, the decline of beauteous decor, and the leaning of the once upright towers. But, as long as one cannot see this destruction from above and afar, there is no destruction at all.
Part 2. As time went by, this shared apartment stood without much change. Suddenly, those on top took fresh interest in the house: one of them, looking through a telescope, found a small unbuilt area next to the house. Such free patches of land always occur in this kind of place to allow people to feast their eyes on God’s beautiful abode from all sides — even from the windows of buses and streetcars. Those on top are precisely the kind of people who should care about such houses: they are wise and quite well informed about the price of downtown real estate. Moreover, if you place this land in the hands of energetic people you are related to (“You can’t ignore your kin,” a Gogolean character said), it will be priceless.
Thus the ground beneath the house began to tremble and rumble with bulldozers, power shovels, trucks, drilling rigs, and such. As might be easily guessed, they are feverishly building a business institution known as an office. And it is totally unclear whether that office will stand next to the House of God or the House of God will from now on stay hidden in the long shadow of the office. The Ancient Romans would in such cases roll their eyes or draw daggers from the folds of their cloaks, crying out in chorus, “ O tempora, o mores!”
Epilogue. Today, the communal apartment, once known as a church, has received another noisy and unceremonious dweller, the modern Ukrainian businessman, for whom sacral things and public opinion seem not to exist. He behaves as if this area next to the church is the last piece of land on Earth, where he can build one more office or mall. And apres moi le deluge! I cannot help recalling Cicero again, who said over 2000 years ago, condemning Catilina’s abuses, “The Senate and the Consul see it, but this one still lives on!” And, let us add, prospers.
P.S.
Approximately at the same time when architect Horodetsky was erecting St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in Kyiv, Antonio Gaudi was building a mystically beautiful Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) Cathedral in Barcelona, Spain. Gaudi died before he could finish his cathedral: he always said, pointing a finger to the sky, that his customer still had time to wait. Yet, the residents of Barcelona called him God’s architect and considered him a saint when he still lived. The Spanish have now persuaded the Catholic Church to begin the process of Antonio Gaudi’s canonization mainly on the grounds that he built his Cathedral.
