[Royal Oak, Mich: April 4-5, 2008] At a typical church setting in April that usually seats Episcopalians on any row but the front, something unusual happened. The congregation rushed the altar.

Be not alarmed, Anglicans; the migration wasn’t as earth shaking as a Pentecostal altar call, but it was something out of the ordinary.

Creating time and space for an out-of-the-ordinary celebration was just what Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland, hoped for. Lind was the speaker and preacher at the annual Becoming the Household of God stewardship conference, held at St. John’s, Royal Oak, on April 4-5. In her two-day presentation, she introduced the 200 assembled to the idea of piazza.

Piazza is the Italian word for place or plaza, said Lind, adding, “it’s what the British call ‘the commons.’” Although the term has something of a tidy municipal tinge, which wasn’t out of line for Lind who was trained as a city planner, when the Cleveland dean wrapped her theology and practice around the theme, piazza took on a larger dimension.

Lind urged the 200 assembled to look at piazza as a metaphor for life in the 21st century: to search for a piazza-place “where you live, work, worship and have your being [and then to] translate it as a way of life.”

She began with a challenge.

“Your image of the household of God is too small. The Baptismal Covenant was written really too early. It’s not about the dignity of every human being. Piazza and the household of God is about the dignity of all creation.

“Every piazza has a distinct personality, but all have essentially the same characteristics. Piazza represents the coming together of our contextual aesthetics, of our entrepreneurial spirit, and of the public expression of community,” she said. “The characteristics are open, inviting, restful, playful, refreshing, and yet filled with energy.

“Piazzas are centers of commerce, of culture, of charity, of conversation, of celebration, of civility, of cooperation and even of competition,” Lind added, explaining that the Cleveland cathedral has transformed its religious grounds into a piazza, which is “by its very nature, public space.”

“You never know what will happen in a piazza, rather you must always come to expect the unexpected, the serendipitous, the spontaneous,” Lind said. Recalling another city planner, William Holly Whyte, Lind said, “we have a moral responsibility to create physical places that facilitate civic engagement and community interaction.”

The responsibility to preserve the commons, Lind claims as a religious obligation that belongs to churches: to ensure the commons for future generations is a moral imperative.

Lind bases the depth of her reflection on piazza-living on the practice of Saint Angela Merici, a 16th century woman religious from northern Italy. A third-order Franciscan sister, Merici lived in the world and remained within her family and community, a trait of the Ursuline religious order that she founded.

Lind’s vision is for a piazza church is a church at the center of a chaotic community, not removed from it. As a result, piazza living calls on a potent element of environmental stewardship.

“Angela understood this and promoted this in all of the work she did. She said ‘find these places of piazza where you can talk about and live out the things that matter to the common good,’” Lind said.

“We need to treat the earth as a home rather than a hotel,” she continued, quoting Sallie McFague, professor of Theology at Vancouver School of Theology. “We have to live in the planet and not on the planet.”

Guided by a goal to keep the church in the center of Cleveland’s community life, Trinity Cathedral houses a bookstore, a café, a Ten Thousand Villages store, conference facilities and grounds that host a quarter of a million visitors a year and 1,300 outside events.

But Lind expanded the theme of piazza to include personal and religious transformation as well. For her Italian mentor, Lind proclaimed that piazza is a life of standing at the cross.

“For Angela, the crucifixion is where it all came together,” Lind said. ”It was at the cross where Jesus fully accepted his humanity. It was there where Angela fully accepted her own limits. She saw the cross as the place where our brokenness is acknowledged. She believed the cross is where our brokenness can heal.

“She also saw the cross as the great place of interconnection, the cross as the great intersection,” Lind added. “Think about the image of the cross as an intersection in the midst of the city.”

But embracing the piazza—whether in city planning, the church development or in religious reconciliation—is chaotic. The Cleveland cathedral is chaotic, Lind portrayed. Its homeless visitors might share space with staid, perhaps stoic worshippers seeking solace on a Sunday morning.

Then the children flood forward at the time of the Eucharist, co-consecrators of the bread and wine in a confluence of bodies and theology that threatens order, invokes the unexpected and spontaneous, and promises an element of holy chaos at its intersection.

“Sometimes we can’t find ideal unity. So perhaps what we need to offer up is the notion of proximity. That we live as neighbors next to one another in the piazza and therefore our unity comes from being neighbors, not being the same, ” Lind said.

As the Household speaker, Lind received an enthusiastic reception from a throng who embraced her invitation to form a chaotic circle around the St. John’s altar to receive the bread and wine. It was spontaneous. It was unexpected. And no one was injured.