One of the views expressed by some at the Liturgical Institute was the idea that the church should be ordered and organized through a very remedial structure so that the mind can rest because in heaven the mind is at rest. As though we cannot have both depth and accessible legibility. I was shocked to hear this expressed by people who the same day criticized the choice of simplistic, romantic, and comforting hymns at a funeral Mass to replace the (Latin Rite) church’s rich and symbolic propers that duly address the complexity of emotions, the actual needs for different prayers, and the profound hope in the reality of the resurrection the church affirms at the death of its members. A church which solely expresses suffering would be as insufferable as vapid pastels and putti. But none of the buildings in these genres which I have personally visited have been anywhere close to pure suffering.

If the Christian cannot see the beauty in pain, who can? The Christian, whose central image is one of suffering and redemption in the cross cannot deny the fact of suffering. This does not mean Christianity is solely a religion of pain, nor that Christianity has a monopoly on suffering. Any sufficiently developed communal religion must come to terms with, embrace, and incorporate the fullness of human experience. Raïssa Maritain, in her description of Marc Chagall's work, exquisitely describes their shared experience of "Jewish joy":

The tender spiritual joy that permeates his work was born with him in Vitebsk, in Russian soil, in Jewish soil. It is thus penetrated with melancholy, pierced by the sting of nostalgia and a hard-pressed hope. Truly, Jewish joy is not like any other; one might say that by sending its roots deeply into the reality of life, Jewish joy simultaneously draws from this reality the tragic sense of its fragility and of death. (Raïssa Maritain, Marc Chagall, 16-17.)

Christian art cannot be all sappy sentimentality, puffy clouds, and putti; faith, hope, and love are more than mere emotions. The Christian who denies the beauty in suffering necessarily denies the fullness of Christ. Take as a start a prophecy of Isaiah, interpreted typologically as a reference to Christ:

"He will watch this servant of his appear among us, unregarded as brushwood shoot, as a plant in waterless soil; no stateliness here, no majesty, no beauty, as we gaze upon him, to win our hearts. Nay here is one despised, how should we recognize that face? How should we take any account of him, a man so despised? Our weakness, and it was he who carried the weight of it, our miseries, and it was he who bore them." (Isaiah 53:2–3)

To quote pre-papacy Cardinal Ratzinger reflecting on this passage:

The text of Isaiah (Is 53,2) supplies the question that interested the Fathers of the Church, whether or not Christ was beautiful. Implicit here is the more radical question of whether beauty is true or whether it is not ugliness that leads us to the deepest truth of reality. Whoever believes in God, in the God who manifested himself, precisely in the altered appearance of Christ crucified as love "to the end" (Jn 13,1), knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty; but in the suffering Christ he also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offence, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering, not in ignoring it. (Full Text)

Both aspects of this paradox of beauty and suffering ("a contrast not a contradiction") are necessary to realize "the totality of true Beauty, of Truth itself." Ratzinger references the same observation in Augustine's Homily IX on the Epistle of John to the Parthians (full text) wherein Augustine described the unchanging loveliness and mortal foulness in Christ's nature as two trumpets (pipes) blown by the same spirit:

9.9 But our soul, my brethren, is unlovely by reason of iniquity: by loving God it becomes lovely. What a love must that be that makes the lover beautiful! But God is always lovely, never unlovely, never changeable. Who is always lovely first loved us; and what were we when He loved us but foul and unlovely? But not to leave us foul; no, but to change us, and of unlovely make us lovely. How shall we become lovely? By loving Him who is always lovely. As the love increases in thee, so the loveliness increases: for love is itself the beauty of the soul. “Let us love, because He first loved us.” Hear the apostle Paul: “But God showed His love in us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us:” the just for the unjust, the beautiful for the foul. How find we Jesus beautiful? “Thou art beauteous in loveliness surpassing the sons of men; grace is poured upon thy lips.” Why so? Again see why it is that He is fair; “Beauteous in loveliness surpassing the sons of men:” because “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But in that He took flesh, He took upon Him, as it were, thy foulness, i.e. thy mortality, that He might adapt Himself to thee, and become suited to thee, and stir thee up to the love of the beauteousness within. Where then in Scripture do we find Jesus uncomely and deformed, as we have found Him comely and “beauteous in loveliness surpassing the sons of men?” where find we Him also deformed? Ask Esaias: “And we saw Him, and He had no form nor comeliness.” There now are two flutes which seem to make discordant sounds: howbeit one Spirit breathes into both. By this it is said, “Beauteous in loveliness surpassing the sons of men:” by that it is said in Esaias, “We saw Him, and He had no form nor comeliness.” By one Spirit are both flutes filled, they make no dissonance. Turn not away thine ears, apply the understanding. Let us ask the apostle Paul, and let him expound to us the unison of the two flutes. Let him sound to us the note, “Beauteous in loveliness surpassing the sons of men.—Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” Let him sound to us also the note, “We saw Him, and He had no form nor comeliness.—He made Himself of no reputation, taking upon Him the form of a servant, made in the likeness of men, and in fashion found as man. He had no form nor comeliness,” that He might give thee form and comeliness. What form? what comeliness? The love which is in charity: that loving, thou mayest run; running, mayest love.

The implication is that ugliness may express the same Spirit as beauty, especially when the identity of Christ and the manifestation of his body are the content of expression. This does not mean that ugly buildings are necessarily beautiful; such an assumption—and the resultant fetishization of the isolated form unredeemed and out of context, as often occurs among the subculture of architects—falls into what Ratzinger calls the "cult of the ugly" where apparent beauty is deception and the vulgar stands in for the truth. There the spirit that fills the flute is different. Similarly, focusing solely on pain and suffering as a mode of spirituality is a symptom of the excessive individualism of personal piety. And its divorced from the core spirituality of the church, that is her liturgy, which incorporates and transcends human suffering in due season and in the context of its metanarrative.

There is no shortage of residential architecture truly suffocates life by its totalitarian intent (whether guided by the desire for absolute control or maximum profits). And there are certainly churches among the examples in this post which injure or impede worship for some people even beyond the question of taste. But the challenge of reconciling the truth in comeliness with the truth in ugliness means that we need to check the knee-jerk dismissal of what appears unpleasant as false merely because it is difficult or not what we are familiar with if we are to grow beyond the easy and comfortable forms of sentimental spirituality. Light and love in an architecture of dark mystery can afford an opportunity to "put away childish things" and thus approach the deepest truth of reality.