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Contents © 1997
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

Flooded with Spiritual Energy

ARCHITECTURE AND ART INTEGRATED

This integration of architecture with religious art is characteristic throughout San Rafael. The interior's white wall, set back under an overhang, is adorned with simple, profoundly expressive stations of the cross in low-relief. At each end of the perimeter, to left and right of the chancel, there glows a single square of stained glass in abstract design, in front of which stand wooden statues of (on the left) the Holy Family and (on the right) Our Lady draped with roses.

This is only a sample of the brilliant stained glass that dominates the church higher up. Above the overhang, an outward-angled slope leads to a row of large windows going around six sides of the octagonal sanctuary. These are square in shape, and disposed one after the other like a series of movie frames, separated only by narrow bands of wood. Some of the panels display complete individual scenes, but in other cases the subject extends across two or more panels. Such is the case with the dramatic crucifixion (which shows only Our Lord's upper body, at a disorienting angle, his left arm stretched out into the adjacent square), or -- on the opposite wall, to counterpoise the Redemption with the Fall it remedied -- the lush green garden of Adam and Eve.

Other subjects include events from the Bible and from saints' lives, in a strong, representational style, supplemented with dazzling abstract bands and swirls of color. The abstract backgrounds are not merely decorative, but help to communicate the spiritual meaning of each scene in the context of the Church's faith -- taking the place of the sky in the baptism of Our Lord, or the manger wall in the three-panel Nativity. When sunlight shines through these windows, the sanctuary is flooded with spiritual energy.

The skylight in the church's dome-like octagonal ceiling triumphantly culminates the stained-glass program. This vast representation of the dove of the Holy Spirit features sweeping arabesques against an abstract background chiefly of gold and blue. The skylight reproduces the experience of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God descended upon the disciples like a rush of mighty wind.

Leaving the church, you pass across a broad entrance hall, with its own stained glass depicting ecclesiastical symbols, and out through carved wooden doors reminiscent of finest Craftsman style in their lyric forms and use of natural material. The doors are sheltered under a long, low, beamed porch; high above, the brown-tile slopes of the building's roof are surmounted by a high cross, designed in a thoroughly original fashion. Between two soaring, white concrete forms, the cross appears both as a negative image cut out of the adjacent shapes (and through which we see the sky) and as a positive, linear image superimposed on this and towering over it.

The only prominent reference to the church's namesake is an oval fountain before the entrance porch. Standing in the water is a weatherworn statuary group, representing a kneeling man in a porkpie hat holding out a fish to a winged angel whose arm rests on a curved staff. These figures are Tobiah, son of Tobit, and the archangel Raphael, on whose advice Tobiah will use the fish's heart and liver to free his wife of the demon Asmodeus, and the fish's gall to cure his father's blindness.

From the parking lot in front of the church, a vast view extends toward the mountains east of Rancho Bernardo. It is the last touch in San Rafael's inspired architectural design.

San Rafael
17252 Bernardo Center Drive
Rancho Bernardo