Photo by Matthew LeJune on Unsplash
Buildings have a habit of hitting people in the face. The natural world exists plainly, of and for itself. Rivers fill their banks, lined with brush and trees in valleys cradled by hills that roll and cascade up, and up, until they finally crest as mountains, raw and untamed. We, as humans, exist as a product of this harmony, this world of innate order and matter-of-fact grace. Yet, we live almost in spite of it all. Our cities and townscapes, while framed and formed by their landscapes, are defined by oppressive architecture. We cannot build an apartment complex that eclipses the beauty and elegance of a flowing stream or placid lake, or an office space that perfectly recalls the sheer force and awe of a bluff overlooking the sea. So, we do the opposite. We build in ways that yell, that demand passerby to look and see these gaudy monuments to mankind. Buildings exist as raw expressions of human nature. They stand for artifice and greed, ingenuity and authority.
No buildings scream louder or clearer than European Cathedrals. From Paris to St. Petersburg, it’s practically impossible to turn a corner without running into an ancient masterpiece. They’re all stone, gold, and glass, hand-wretched from the Earth and mounded up into the air. Their towers thrust skyward, ensuring that as long as the building can be seen, it must be noticed.
I was raised Catholic, but in the Pacific Northwest, where church architecture is closer in style to a middle school auditorium than the Sistine Chapel. The church of my childhood is all mill-cut oak and fir from sacristy to tabernacle, and features a trapezoidal roof that, when viewed from the road, is reminiscent of a Pizza Hut.
There’s a schism there, between the design processes and philosophies of the Old World and the one down the road. Europe is filled with churches designed to intimidate. They were meant to be viewed with knees on the floor and hands passing the collection plate. The thesis of a Cathedral is to show off the wrath of God. If the tower of Babel was built in an attempt to put humans above their Lord, St. Peter's Basilica was constructed to unequivocally show that pursuit is utterly impossible. It’s a very Old Testament message. There's no reminder of love, of salvation, of community and brotherhood. For everything that Catholicism is, good and bad, these Cathedrals give a message that’s had the positives boiled out. The churchgoing hallmarks of my youth, aluminum folding chairs and a pair of golden retrievers that were raised by the priest who baptized me, would feel alien in the context of those large, sordid halls.
That being said, there are aspects worthy of imitation in Cathedrals. Look to our capital city in Washington; it’s all ionic columns and greco-roman domes. The United States seems to subconsciously feel inferior to Europe due to its relative lack of history. The sheer magnitude that comes with age is inherently present in Cathedrals.
As such, America has no need for Cathedrals. There have been attempts, for example an anglican church in D.C. claims the title of the “Washington National Cathedral.” Its facade clearly borrows from Notre Dame de Paris, yet it’s tainted, as if the form itself can’t abide being within ten minutes from a McDonalds. The denomination left a hole in the stained glasswork. To replace saints and martyrs, there were confederate soldiers in the windows, and a statue of Darth Vader remains in the rafters. The names of dead secular men, like Reagan (a presbysterian) and Nixon (a quaker) are stitched in the seats. They don’t belong there. The national cathedral exists as a monument to America at its worst. Assorted failures and successes, muddled by their existence in context with one another. A true Cathedral cannot live in the United States. They do not breathe the true breath of the land the way they do on the other side of the Atlantic. America has no need for cathedrals. America demands another metaphor, one that is as fresh and nuanced as our history.
For the past century or so, the United States has been devoted to ruthlessly and relentlessly exporting any cultural product that’s shelf-stable enough to cross the Atlantic. Convenience stores, which were invented in Texas back in the 1920s, are now found on every continent save Antarctica. I’d say the second most iconic piece of American iconography, behind the stars and stripes, are the golden arches. Two out of every three McDonald’s are located outside the United States.
I bring this up because the United States stands as the most geographically and culturally diverse nation on earth, and yet is uncannily talented at homogenizing that variety. The fact that a little burger joint born in the San Bernardino sunshine can become an international corporate monolith is frankly, terrifying, and a little sad.
I try to focus on the aspects of American culture that haven’t been exported as commodities abroad. By looking at the things that cannot find a foothold in the world at large, we as Americans can better understand what we stand for. Football is one of those things. I believe there’s a reason gridiron football hasn’t seen success outside North America. The sport simply touches cultural ideals that aren’t exportable in the way we ship out cheeseburgers and snickers bars. Like root beer, biscuits and gravy, and gerrymandering, football is anchored in the states. Beyond that, football is, at its heart, a game of the earth. No other sport in the American canon asks its players to bend over and dig their hands into the ground, or to churn their feet into the sod in an attempt to push forward. This is most clearly shown in the inevitably of the tackle; the overwhelming majority of plays end with the ball carrier being dragged to the ground as a result of the cruel twist of momentum, mass, and gravity. The land the game is played on is as or more integral to football than the forward pass, helmets, and shoulder pads.
My hometown, Eugene Oregon, is defined by a small set of natural features. The Willamette river trickles out of the hills to the south and east into the valley that bears its name. The land on which the city sits is bursting with trees that gradually thin out as the land turns to the agricultural utilitarianism of the north. Eugene is lacking in major landmarks. There is no Golden Gate Bridge or Empire State Building for people to crowd around airplane windows to get a blurry view of. The buildings downtown barely stretch much taller than the doug fir and bigleaf maple trees that line the sidewalks.
Eugene’s motto was once “The world's greatest city for the arts and outdoors.” That slogan has since been dialed back, from “The world’s greatest city…” to “A great city…” That softening defines Eugene. It is not necessarily “the greatest” in anything that matters. It is not a star on a map, or a name circled in red ink or yellow highlighter. But for the lane it occupies, a midsize city populated by college students and countless trees, it exists definitely enough for it to call itself great. The closest thing to a skyward icon Eugene sports is found in a park that’s bordered by two hard lines. I-105 to the north, and the river to the south. In that sliver of green stands a Stadium.
Autzen Stadium is many things. At worst, it is an edifice of concrete and steel, that’s seen millions of dollars in renovations funded by a man who’s devoted similar levels of capital to influencing local elections. At the same time, Autzen is a thing of beauty. For a few Saturdays in the fall, tens of thousands of people fill the seats, regardless of weather. The weather does not matter, for it never rains in Autzen Stadium. In those hours, the ground shakes from glorious noise, outlined by the sky above and the Cascade mountains juxtaposed in this distance.
The object that triggers this noise is, of course, football. The players, coaches, and audience are all there to partake in this joyous ritual of the Earth. It is incredibly difficult to find words that give this glory justice. Individual details, like the peculiar smell of popcorn, hotdogs, and overpriced beer traveling on a late-September breeze, pile up together to paint the picture of something profoundly beautiful. Stadiums and Cathedrals both function as monuments to beauty. The difference between the two is that Cathedrals are built on static beauty, the power of majesty of a dusty stained glass window fifty feet above your head. A Cathedral does not care for the community there. Their presence in the pews does nothing for its purpose. In contrast, the football stadium is at its most potent when it is full, and open to the air. The dynamic of the crowd when the game is kicked off, when the home team’s ballcarrier shoves off a tackler and powers into the daylight, cleats pumping, even when the whistle blows and countless droves of daydrunk spectators shuffle in lines to the bathroom, pulses with a seemingly eternal life.
Cathedrals lack that heartbeat. The lifeblood of community and brotherhood does not flow there. They are the descendants of the follies of the Old Testament, which were drilled into me by a decade-plus of Catholic schooling. Adam left Eden. Abram and Solomon chose to listen to their genitals before their Father. The Israelites, starving and angry, forged a golden calf and begged to return to Egypt and slavery. These flaws were met not with forgiveness and salvation, but punishment. Cathedrals act as the extension of that Genesis-style judgment. There is nothing to be found there but stone.
That’s not to say football is always true to its principles. As a living thing in a late capitalistic society, it is subject to forces with magnitude great enough to shake it. Football can grind a person to dust, converting their strength, will, and love of the game into money for the men with the biggest checkbooks, leaving players empty, exhausted, and damaged. Not satisfied, those same men seek to steal and blackmail their way into even more money, with which to build domes, bigger and better, gleaming like thirty pieces of silver. Is football really better because it's shielded from the sun and the rain? Is God truly pleased by altars of precious metal that exist because His children went hungry? The iconic sportswriter Jon Bois once said “If it happens outside it's a sport, and if it happens inside it's a board game.” At a certain point, it feels as if the game of football has left its roots and became something artificial, crafted of cheap plastic and cardboard for the point of extortion.
I cannot stand for that. I feel in my soul that the sport of football is something truly beautiful. I deeply and truly believe that Notre Dame Stadium in Indiana is more significant than the Cathedral of the same moniker in Paris. If you stick around a Cathedral long enough, you’ll eventually hear a particular section of the book of Genesis: “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In the context of one of those great halls of Europe, that can feel like a warning. The Lord and His Church want you to know that your existence in the cathedral and the world at large is temporary, and therefore it is entirely inconsequential. In terms of a football game, that line means something very different. Knowing that you will eventually return to the very Earth that the sport is built on is not an admonishment for a lack of meekness. Knowing thateveryone ends up in the dirt is not a threat. That’s just how the game is played.
Hayden Shoemaker is an 18-year-old college student from Oregon. He likes to spend his free time reading cheap paperbacks and taking worryingly long walks in the woods.