Seagoing stories are among my favorites. Perhaps the Royal Navy ship HMS
Surprise, with her strict wartime discipline and rigid chain of command, is a little more like a monastic community than your average parish. Still, it is not for nothing that the architectural term for the main space in a church, where the congregation gathers, is nave, from the Latin term for 'ship'. In an
essay on church architecture,
Aidan Hart writes
".....the basilica was the only building of the pagan Roman empire which was suitable for large Christian assemblies, since the interiors of pagan temples were designed only for the priests and the sacrifices, not for the worshipping public. Another early symbolic reading of the basilica relates it to a ship. According to the “Apostolic Constitutions” (c. 400 A.D.) “the house of the believers is long in shape like a ship [hence nave from the Latin navis] and directed towards the east.” Here the emphasis is on the transitory nature of our present life, of our movement towards the heavenly city to come. The basilica is primarily, therefore, a church plan which emphasises action, motion."
What other image but that of a ship could convey so vividly that we are all in this together, a company of shipmates on a journey, huddled together against the hostile elements in the great wild world around us?
Yet those who go down to the sea in ships (Ps. 107:23) are by no means cowards and isolationists. On the contrary, they are adventurers, like
Saint Brendan the Navigator-- or, to mention a fictional example, Caspian the Tenth of Narnia, who leads the
Dawn Treader expedition in search of his father's lost friends. With him sails
Reepicheep, the valiant talking mouse who seeks nothing less than Aslan's own country.
