Metamorphosis Moment: Ritual Artistry and the Work of the People

Abstract

For many reasons, places and ways of worship change throughout time. The artifacts communities leave behind—stone henges, burial passage tombs, baptistry ruins, roofless and glassless medieval church edifices, abandoned chapels retrofitted for B&B’s, and, more recently, church property broken and shared as a sacrament of affordable housing—testify to the impermanence of what we try desperately to believe is timeless. The human need to find meaning and mark sacred place and time, however, is indelible. And we will keep doing this as long as we are humans, for this is as much who we became as the development of our upright posture.