Writing Workshop

SENSORY DETAILS by Penny Spicer

     Our voices echo through the once hallowed room. The voices of the past must have echoed similarly. The sharp white walls hear the sounds and send them back to us. The thick walls of adobe mud hold on to all they have heard and yet bounce the speaker's utterances back to the center of the room and on to the opposite wall where the sound ricochets off and zooms to another wall, another ear. Then I look more closely at the walls and see the softness, the years of listening to all the murmurs, the prayers, the speeches, the cacophonous meetings. What must these walls have heard? What secrets do they keep? What fervent prayers have they sent on to the supplicant's god? What gaiety have they witnessed at weddings, baptisms and other family affairs?¹ The stark, yet serene walls of white that enclose its occupants, protecting them from the vagaries of weather outside. The walls that witness the changing roles of the chapel--from church to residence to working community center and back to its usual state as a church.²

     The windows in the walls are the eyes of the chapel. Can they be the eyes through which the looker can see the soul of the chapel, the soul of the neighborhood, the soul of the people who live and have lived in the neighborhood? The brightness, the airiness of the chapel holds one captive in its rich beauty, its rich history. This is the soul that is seen as one looks in. What does the chapel see as it looks outside itself, through its eyes? It must see the beauty of the area--the desert, the people, the homes that create the neighborhood.³ It must see the changes that have occurred around it and yet it is returned to its original self. It is as if time stood still. It is a restful and calming refuge from a more urban neighborhood.' It is enveloped by the love for it, the reverence for it.

     From its perch on the hill,⁴ the chapel's front doors yawn, opening up to a view of the Santa Catalina Mountains by day or a star-filled sky by night'. The love from the neighborhood rushes in and fills the chapel. Since the chapel's birth, it has been filled with the love, the joy, the sadness and grief, the reverence, of its worshippers, its occupants. Walking into the chapel, one can feel all this. One can bathe oneself in the sense of the chapel--the beauty, the serenity, the history, the feeling of place.

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