Some church buildings do their best to indicate the interrelation of heaven and earth. The Eastern Orthodox churches do it by envisaging heaven as the inner sanctuary, the space around the altar, and earth as the part of the building outside that space. The two are separated by the iconostasis, upon which are portrayed the saints, whose presence in heaven is not far from the worshippers on earth. Western cathedrals and abbeys often did a similar thing through soaring Gothic architecture, giving us at floor level a sense of belonging within (but unable at the moment to inhabit more than a
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