I find you either are or you aren't. A cathedral person, that is. Some people seem to be spiritually supercharged when standing under soaring stone arches and gothic gargoyles and color-bursting rose windows of stained glass and intricate lacy carvings of marble and columns of granite and flying buttresses and dizzingly tall bell towers and great pipe organs and... can you tell I'm one of the Cathedral people? I love them! For me, Cathedrals assist in finding God and in connecting to a great deal which promotes the enterprise of prayer. I never miss a chance to visit and tour and worship in a grand and lofty sanctuary.
 

Others of us are just the opposite. For them, Cathedrals are a distraction of busy-ness and too overwhelming of scale to promote efficacious prayer. Such people crave simplicity and need a more intimate setting. There is no right or wrong in this, of course. It's purely a matter of personal preference, and might well be beyond our conscious choosing. Yes, you either are or you aren't. And I am a Cathedral person. Others are not.
 

Moreover, as your rabbi, I confess this to you knowing full well that the overwhelming preponderence of rabbinic, let alone Jewish tradition, would urge me to reconsider and, at the very least, cool my ardor for sacred brick and mortar.
 

In our own day, no less a sage than the great Abraham Joshua Heschel claimed that Time rather than Space is the major category of significance in our Judaism. Heschel was, of course, quite right in noting that the first divine hallowing of creation was concerned not with any place but with time: sanctification of the seventh day, the Sabbath.
 

We also remember how, when a child once asked the Hasidic sage, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk -- "Where is God?" That great teacher replied, "Whenever you let Him in." Not "where," but "whenever"; not place but time is Judaism's answer for the true locus of godliness and sanctity.
 

Still, it is far from rare that we human beings either dismiss or distrust this nonspacial notion of holiness. Scholars of religious anthropology have long drawn attention to the phenomenon of "sacred space" in archaic, pagan religions. Such faiths believed in a central place between the cosmic planes of heaven and earth where communication between human and divine was miraculously facilitated.
 

One has only to recall the story of those ill-fated tower builders of Babel, to realize that, for our Judaism, God has no such celestial geography. And yet, having said that, we need to note how, in both our Torah and Haftarah portions for this Shabbat, the people of Israel, your ancestors and mine, are resolutely intent on building sanctuaries for their God.
 

In Exodus we read how Moses is instructed by God to tell the people, "and let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them." And then, in tomorrow's Haftarah selection, First Kings, Chapter 8: Verse 27 we are reminded how King Solomon, designated by God to build the First Temple in Jerusalem, freely admits that the Creator, who could not be contained by all the heavens, surely could not be limited to this house that I have built.
 

Still, those holy shrines were built and we have been building and maintaining them (at no little effort and annual cost) ever since!
 

Nevertheless my friends, architecture for God seems to be an embarrassment within Judaism. In the language of the prayerbook, "Where is the place of His glory? And the answer -- immediate and unequivocal: God's glory fills all space, and to limit God to a set location is to commit spiritual heresy in Judaism.
 

Said the Rabbis in the Talmud, The world is not God's place, but rather -- God is HaMakom -- god is the Place of the world.
 

Our faith is found beyond any four walls. We have no need to ascend unto physical heights in order to find our God. The author of Psalm 24 speaks rhetorically when he asks --
 

Who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord?

He answers:
 

The One who hath clean hands and a pure heart, who has not taken God's name in vain, nor sworn deceitfully.

You see, "Place" is a metaphor, not to be taken literally when applied to God.
 

The place of God is within, between, among us. Jewish Godliness is to be found in relationship, not in Row AA. God is encountered in morality, not geography.
 

The Jerusalem Talmud contains this insightful teaching. It says:
 

The idol is near and yet far. God is far and yet near. For a man enters a synagogue and stands behind a pillar, and prays in a whisper -- and God hears his prayer.

So it is with all His creatures. Can there be a nearer God than this? He is as near to His creatures as the ear is to the mouth.
 

Our Rabbinic teachers were so sure of this, they wrote this incredible Midrash. They insisted that the murder of Abel came about because he and his brother Cain each argued that the sanctuary of God be built on his exclusive property.

Cain and Abel both owned the earth, but each would insist on having God's lodging in his jurisdiction.

Now, one wonders how much we really have grown in maturity and sophistication over these many, many centuries? I mean think of the headlines that we have read and the heartbreaking events that we have witnessed over the shameful tragedy of the recent Temple Mount protests and riots in Jerusalem, as Jewish and Moslem tensions exploded over rights of ownership to God's holy sites. All reason, all concern for future harmony and a world of Middle East peace instead of tragic bloodshed seem to have been forgotten as primevil rage and theological triumphalism beguiled to Primitivism.

When will we come to understand that as Rabbi Mendel tried to teach us centuries ago, the question is not "Where is God?", but When is God?" And that being in God's presence is not a matter of being in the right place but of doing the right things.

Says Rabbi Harold Kushner,
 

Religion properly understood is not a series of beliefs about God. It is an inventory of moments in our lives, things we do and things that happen to us, in which the person whose eyes are open will be able to see God.

Morgan Roberts was a minister friend of mine when we lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As I remember, Morgan was both a fine racquetball player and an absolutely brilliant pulpiteer.

In one sermon, I'll never forget how he spoke on finding faith in a life characterized by such uncertainty, when we are often left to wonder -- "What's next?"  I find myself, now almost twenty years later still choking up with emotion as I remember Morgan's words.

Here's what Morgan said to his congregation one Sunday morning:
 

Six years ago this week, our David's dear boxer, Winston, died of cancer...Still, his memory is kept alive by the very active presence of his nephew, Churchill, who is my constant companion, and who sat at my feet as I wrote this sermon.

...Churchill is unceasingly at my side. He waits outside the glass door of the shower when I bathe. He exists to be in my presence. This does not mean that he understands what is going on in my mind, or why I leave him to go to church, or why I feed him in a certain way or take him for a walk at one time and not at another.

As with God and man, so it is with man and dog: my ways are higher than his ways, and my thoughts are beyond the reach of his thoughts.

Still, he probably thinks that I exist for the sole purpose of caring for him and spending time with him, just as I often think that God's principle business is that of listening to me and taking care of me.

Churchill has no answers about why I let certain things happen to him. I am sure he cannot understand why I let the veterinarian stick needles in him. Still, he jumps in the car with enthusiasm when I invite him to make that annual trip for the needle sticking.

He does not know it, but someday I will have to take him to the vet for the last time. He will not know what is happening to him, nor why it is happening. He lives without answers. However, his is the bliss of the eternal now, and on that last day, he will drive to the vet's knowing what he has always known: he knows whose dog he is, and he knows whom he loves.

Creatures who know that can live without answers -- without having to ask, 'What's next?'
 

Now my dear friends, I couldn't imagine putting it any better than that. "On Finding Faith'" it's not, after all, the where, it's the when. It's knowing that there lives a loving God. And it's never forgetting to Whom we belong and Whom we do love.

Living lives in such a manner is our only defense against What's next?