Church recycling

21^st century Holland is known for being creative with their churches. Many of them have been turned into houses, concert halls, museums, shops, there’s one which was adapted to become Paradise (“Paradiso”), but none, so far as I know, that has become Hell (“Inverno”). One of the old churches in Maastricht houses a grand bookstore (Selexyz Dominicanen).

However appealing it may be to stroll through a garden of books inside a former church building, I doubt the longevity of this idea. The rationale behind church-recycling is:  turn a church into something else more useful, as people lost interest in church as a place for prayer and contemplation. I personally love the idea of “something else” = bookstore, but how durable is it?


Bookstores are dying out too, as people read less and less, preferring to scroll, just touch the surface and quickly rush to the next hyperlink. It causes changes in the brain and makes it quite likely that the generations to come will lose the capacity of deep reflection (Nicolas Carr “The Shallows. What the internet is doing to our brains”). But true reading is more like in this poem by Wallace Stevens:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm (…)

                         The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

(full text at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-house-was-quiet-and-the-world-was-calm/) True reading is complete immersion, therefore it dislikes distractions and hyperlinks. It’s a journey of discovery: discovery of the story, but above all – a discovery of yourself. The reader becomes the book and creates the story himself. There is no objective “book”, the book takes place in the mind of the reader. Hence, no book is the same for two people.  

I wonder what this splendid Dominican church will become next… Something more useful...

There’s one more adaptation of a church building which I find particularly appealing. Some believers would call it blasphemous, but I think the founding fathers of KesselsKramer advertising agency (www.kesselskramer.com – don’t be surprised by the completely irrelevant website, you’re at the right place, just browse further) got God’s message right.

All love is creative. God has been the most creative SOMETHING (or the most creative NOTHING, depending on which philosophy you adhere to).

This unfortunately cannot be said of Church as an institution, most of the time.