wood & light

Notes on the University's Chapel of Christ the Teacher.

By Brian Doyle

Pietro Belluschi built it, using Cascadian woods — red cedar, white oak, silver maple, yellow fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock, pine, cherry. Behind it are muscular oaks and madrone trees and tall lean vaulting Douglas firs as straight as poles, and adjacent is a thicket of laurels and rhododendrons so old that their arms are thicker than your legs. Here Belluschi wanted to make a holy cabin that would fit its place, a university chapel big enough for hundreds of people and thousands of prayers but not so big that it would be arrogant — not there, not against those massive oaks, the massive river, the massive forest that once housed the biggest trees in the history of the world.

      He used brick and stone and tile too, the stones drawn from local rivers and arranged as a little streambed outside to course away the rain from the gutterless tile roof, but otherwise the chapel is wood — beams of fir, roof of hemlock and pine, floor of white oak, walls and altar and chairs and kneelers and lectern of cherry.

      He wanted mammoth doors, herculean doors, doors as big as boats, so he asked his friend LeRoy Setziol to carve the doors, which he did, and the posts and lintels too, huge things, big as trees.

      Setziol had been in the war and had hidden from Japanese snipers in caves on remote islands in the Pacific. After the war he came home and was ordained a minister in Maryland but when he welcomed black people into his congregation he was invited to not be a minister anymore, and eventually he ended up in Oregon, where he decided to become a woodcarver, although he had never picked up a gouge or chisel in his life. It turned out that he was a sort of a genius at carving wood. “Wood is the history of its own living,” he said once. “I try to cooperate with it, and feel for unknown properties and unpredictable events. That’s about as well as I can explain it.”

      Setziol waited and waited for the right wood to cooperate with, and one day three huge black walnut trees washed up on the Oregon coast, and he had them hauled to his wood-shop in the hills near the old timber town of Willamina, and there he cut the doors and lintels, four tons of walnut incised with a sunburst, and a branching vine, and Greek letters, and other signs and symbols of the Christ, the man who had once been Yesuah ben Joseph, a young itinerant preacher in Judea during the time of the Roman Empire.

      Belluschi found an ancient ivory crucifix for the tiny side chapel where the faithful are shriven of their sins, and a glassmaker to make the densely colored inch-thick stained-glass windows, and a priest who was a scholar of ancient Christian baptistries to design the concrete baptismal fountain that trickles all night and day like a creek running through the nave of the chapel, and a massive organ from Austria, and a thick tapestry from the Netherlands, and then the chapel was finished just as summer closed up shop twenty years ago.

      It was dedicated in early October, on a bright windy day. Priests and donors and students spoke and then Belluschi spoke, briefly, fingering a scrap of paper on which he had jotted notes.

      “A church is much more than a building,” he said. “It is people coming together to evoke God’s harmony. It is our hope that the qualities which we have tried to impart to this structure, inadequate as they may be, will endure, and move people to incomparable adventures of the spirit.”

      When he sat down he crammed the scrap of paper back in his jacket pocket, but a sharp-eyed priest later asked him for it, and the university for which Pietro Belluschi built his little wooden chapel still has the paper, now carefully framed and hanging in the museum.

A friend of mine died while climbing a mountain. He was a professor of physics, a baseball player, a lover of women, a fly fisherman, a student of astronomy, a man with a car in which were clothes, books, coffee cups, cleats, student papers, beer bottles, boots of various sorts, a gyroscope, reels, and the front wheel of a bicycle. A thousand tons of ice fell on him and he died. He was the last man in a line of thirteen men and women climbing Mount Hood late in the afternoon of a sunny day in May. He volunteered to be last so he could help with any trouble above him. An avalanche missed the first twelve climbers and caught Tom McGlinn. This was on a Sunday. The next Friday there was a ceremony in the chapel. The chapel had seen funerals before, o yes, plenty of funerals, people die like flies, they die young and they die old and they die every step of the way from young to old, but this was a raw wound, a young man crushed on the mountain that gleamed coldly behind the chapel, and it wasn’t a funeral exactly. It was a remembering, and it was different.

      People stared at the mountain for a long time as they walked up to the chapel.

      The doors were flung open and the side door was propped open and the back door was propped open too, and the wind sifted through, shuddering the candles — a west wind with cedar in it from the huge forest across the river.

      He had been a headlong man, furious and passionate and merciful and disorganized, which breeds great affection. His friends were alive with stories of him. He had forgotten this and that, shouted and courted at the wrong times, wandered the world. His mind was a clean machine and his house and car and office were monuments to chaos. He once ran out to left field in a baseball game wearing fishing waders, having driven furiously from a river to the game without bothering to change. He asked of his students “ragamuffin irreverence,” as he said. He asked to teach a university course in astronomy because he knew nothing about it and wished to know a great deal about it. He kept a class out all night until dawn counting meteor showers. He took a class snow-shoeing in April on the mountain that would kill him.

      A priest stood and said that he had not slept for days after Tom died, and had not known what he would possibly be able to say at this event, but then suddenly the Psalms came to him, whole singing snatches of them, and the night before he had risen from his bed and opened a Bible and found Psalm 24: “The man whose heart is pure will climb the mountain of the Lord ... The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples. Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place? The man with clean hands, who desires not worthless things, who has not sworn so as to deceive his neighbor ... Such are the men who seek the face of God ...”

      Those words rang around the wooden chapel and I watched as hands went to mouths, hands covered eyes, hands rose suddenly, hands folded into prayer wings. The travels of hands in their infinite emotions, hands as the birds of the heart.

      Hours after the remembering was done there I went back to sit vigil and I noticed that the doors were still open, and slicing through the chapel in glee and confusion were dozens of swallows, barn swallows and tree swallows, their bright bellies flashing in the russet light as they wheeled over the baptistry and altar and organ and balcony, up into the little turret at the top of the building and back down with zooming swoops, in and out of the chapel in numbers I could not count although I tried, feeling it important to number the hairs on the heads of even the smallest of quicksilver visitors that day. But there was more life than I could measure.

It’s one large wooden room, essentially, which provides much of its delight; a vaulting cathedral is a lovely and heroic thing, but such a spiritual battleship is designed for awe and humility, not intimacy, and I believe that the small is far more likely to bear the fingerprints of the Incomprehensible than the vast. So I study children, and insects, and the quiet grace of old women shuffling to impatient buses. And I sit in this one small chapel, drawn to it not so much for its role as religious house, although I have an abiding respect and affection for Catholicism, but for its virtues as prism, refuge, fulcrum; it is a room where powers and pains of all sorts are gathered again and again and again, simmered and melded and melted and stewed. Perhaps that daily marshaling of emotion is what gives the place its holiness, more than do its official duties. Perhaps words and smoke and tears and music and long empty hours all soak into the wooden walls and season them in unimaginable ways.

      The chapel is not all dignity and grace, of course; there are three small offices in it, and I have heard a phone ringing haughtily during Mass — once, incredibly, just as the priest hoisted the consecrated Host aloft, the very moment when Catholics believe a miracle of transformation occurs. And there is a groaning elevator to the balcony aloft, and for years an organ squatted hugely toadishly out of proportion with the clean simple wooden lines of the rest of the place, and one or two of the lights overhead are always burnt out.

      Yet somehow its flaws warm it. No building can be intimidating if its elevator growls like a crusty uncle and its brassy telephones snarl with no respect at all for rituals as old as human civilization — the blessing by water of new beings in the world, the formal troth of husband and wife before their families and friends, the blessing of the bodies of the dead as they begin their journey to the splay of the stars.

      I have loved and savored chapels and churches and prayer-rooms and temples around the world, but something about this wooden room that rivets me. I have seen people married here, and dead men remembered, and infants baptized, and robed teenagers welcomed into the church; and I have seen people prostrate in prayer in the dark, their arms flung out on the floor like fingered wings. I have seen weeping and fainting and laughing and dancing. I have seen a blind priest conduct a Mass. I have seen two young strong pliant supple boys carry their broken father to the altar for a blessing. I have seen a long line of people folding themselves down to the floor to kiss a rough wooden cross on Good Friday, the darkest day of the Catholic year, when Catholics touch the sign of the thin gaunt man they believe broke time into the extraordinary pieces named Before and After. I have chanted poetry there myself, the songs of William Blake, and I have heard music there to shred your heart, and I have heard a priest sing a Mass there from beginning to end, a thing hardly done in the world now, a riveting thing.

      I have seen people there at dawn and at dusk, at noon and in the blue hours of the night. Once I creaked open the walnut doors long after midnight and saw a man kneeling and weeping and I turned and left, the chapel suddenly too small for more than one harrowed soul at a time.

      There are as many places to pray as there are manners of praying, but some places have a peculiar power and poetry that way — they are conducive to contemplation, amenable to shivers in the soul. Great waters incline me to prayer; and so does darkness, when those I love are asleep and I stare at their sculpted faces; and so does the cedar chapel Pietro Belluschi built, twenty years ago this fall, his room made of wood in the woods, his house for the incomparable adventures of the spirit. A prayer for him who made it and for us who need it so.

Brian Doyle (bdoyle@up.edu) is the editor of this magazine and the author most recently of The Grail, about a year in the life of a vineyard in Dundee, Oregon.