Meredith Haggerty’s (MFA’07) Thursday afternoon yoga class in Bond Chapel. (Photography by Joy Olivia Miller)
Doing yoga in church
Hoping that God won’t smite me.
The pews were removed from Bond Chapel more than a year ago. With the chairs stacked against the walls, the space is entirely open. And yet the students here to take yoga on a Thursday afternoon have lined up their mats on each side of the aisle, as if the room were still divided in traditional halves. The class is a gentle one. Meredith Haggerty, MFA’07, leads us through a slow cat-cow sequence, followed by forward bends and a salute to the sun. The late-afternoon sun sinks as we salute it. By the time we get to bridges, the room is almost dark. The bridge pose might possibly be the best position in which to appreciate Bond Chapel. Lying on your back, you can gaze up at the wooden angels around the edge of the ceiling. Strumming their soundless harps, the angels gaze back. The pictures in the stained-glass windows are so small. I’ve never been able to figure out what they are, and today, in the gathering dark, I definitely can’t. There are words in the windows—Enter into his gates with thanksgiving / And into his courts with praise / Be thankful unto him / And bless his name (Psalm 100:4)—which seems paradoxical; wasn’t the intent of stained-glass windows to convey Bible stories to the illiterate? The walls have words too: six of the eight Beatitudes, carved into wood painted to look like brass. During the final relaxation, Haggerty—a massage therapist as well as a yoga teacher—pads around the room, giving each of us a quick neck massage with something tingly and herbal-smelling on her hands. It’s Tiger Balm, she tells me later. I had known this only as the substance that Sonny Liston allegedly juiced his gloves with while fighting Muhammad Ali in 1964. Ali won the heavyweight championship anyway. On your neck—not in your eyes—it feels wonderful.   Haggerty began teaching yoga at Bond last year, soon after the pews were replaced with chairs. Unlike pews, chairs can be moved easily. Chairs can be turned to face the center of the room, as they are for recitals on the new Baroque-style organ—the reason for the renovation. Chairs can be stacked against the walls to make space for yoga and Muslim prayer. Muslim prayer: it was this aspect of the renovation that inspired a blip of outrage from the website Campus Reform last spring. “REPORT: University of Chicago removed pews from 88-year old chapel to accommodate Islamic prayers” was the blog’s emotive title. The University News Office fielded questions from Fox News and a few others, and then the story went away. Since the renovation, Muslim prayer has been held in Bond on Fridays at noon and 12:45 p.m. No one in the University community has complained about that or about the missing pews.   I’ve taken yoga from Haggerty before: a few years ago I tried her restorative yoga class at Rockefeller Chapel. I had expected to find the class in the basement or a similar kind of function room. Instead it was held on the chancel. I was taken aback—even though I had seen many speeches and musical performances at Rockefeller, even though I had once been on the chancel myself, to graduate. But somehow, stretched out on my little yoga mat and covered with a blanket, blinking up at the stunning vaulted ceiling, I expected God to smite me at any instant. “Ohhh,” Elizabeth Davenport, dean of Rockefeller Chapel, says sympathetically, when I confess to her over the phone. It was her idea to hold yoga classes in that space. It was her idea to expand these offerings to Bond. My confusion is understandable, because Rockefeller Chapel “looks like a medieval cathedral,” Davenport says. “But it’s not a Christian sacred space. It’s home to a wide variety of spiritual, artistic, and academic activities.” True, Christian services are offered on Sunday mornings. But Davenport wants all students to feel at home there: “we like to say, from atheists to Zoroastrians,” she says. “This is a space that draws out the best in us. You can be anything and appreciate a moment of stillness.” Haggerty has taught yoga at Rockefeller for five years, starting soon after Davenport suggested it. “For me Bond and Rockefeller have become sacred over time,” she says. “I am aware of how my bare feet connect to the floors of the chapels as I teach. That connection feels sacred, as does the connection between the sounds in Rockefeller with the current season. Winter is so quiet.” But Bond is her favorite space to teach. “I was married there,” she says. When she teaches yoga in the chapel, that’s what she thinks about.   [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"1117","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"257","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"460"}}]] Haggerty’s yoga classes are open to alumni as well as students. The classes are free for students and a $5 donation from everybody else.