May 2024
by The Revd Katharine Rumens
This time I have not locked myself in the flat and I understand the recycling bins. I know where the supermarket is and which are local market days.
I was first here in November and yes, this a happy return.
My duty month this time (April 2024) coincided with Salone de Mobile, Milan Design Week. Being in the Brera district, the church is in the middle of the action. For days contractors have been constructing exhibition space in neighbouring courtyards and showrooms.
All Saints’ Milan itself had been let to a group of German designers whose letting fee will cover the cost of fixing the outside walls. Beyond this financial advantage, however, I am delighted that the church is involved – better that than a shut building on a busy street to which no one gives a second glance.
We have dealt with technicians’ demands and designers’ ambitions and remained friends. It was a ‘no’ to the request that a 20-kilo chandelier be hung from an interior hook and I realise that the church is showcasing lifestyles I do not aspire to: all that low white upholstery and immaculate glass surfaces that show the dust.
Although the church is now a designer showroom, I still need to get a hymn book from the cupboard at the back. I wander in. Not being sleekly dressed, I am asked if I am a tourist. When the answer is no I am asked if I am the cleaner.
My explanation that I am the priest and live in the flat upstairs gives rise to a pattern of conversations over the week. This designer tells me that his clients have congratulated him on the space. The high ceilings, the openness, the age of the building, the atmosphere. The space is ‘special’ he says. It emerges that as a child he loved visiting churches.
Outside the church buzzes and the queue for the coffee machines can reach the street.
Perhaps, just perhaps, in future a visitor who seldom, if ever, crosses the threshold of a sacred building will remember that they stepped into a ‘special space’ and something stuck about this space where the community gathers week by week to say their prayers and worship God.
The author Francis Spufford describes the church as “a specialised building where attention comes easier.”
“The calm here is not denial” Spufford writes in his threads blog (Breathe 14.12.2012). “It’s an ancient, imperturbable lack of surprise. To any conceivable act you might have committed, the building is set up only to say, ‘Ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down?'”
The designers have already booked for next year.
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The Revd Katharine Rumens is a retired Anglican priest based in Salisbury, England. She has had two month-long stints covering a clergy vacancy at All Saints’ Milan, one of the 250 congregations across 30 countries of Diocese in Europe. Read her first blog about her chaplaincy in November 2023
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