The things not seen are eternal
Austin architect Herman Dyal revisits his childhood church to find a place frozen in time.
Choir robes still hang in the closet at Herman Dyal’s boyhood church on the south side of San Antonio.
Crayons rest on the children’s desks.
A black chalkboard bears the handwriting of someone who wrote “God is love” a long time ago.
Dyal, a longtime Austin architect, hadn’t visited the church in more than 50 years when, back in 2021, on one of his pandemic drives to his hometown, he spotted an open door and entered.
The place felt frozen in time. He took some photos and decided to keep coming back.
Over two years, he spent many hours in this church, which, at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, had some 2,000 members, including Dyal and his extended family.
Times have changed, and the church is slowly deteriorating. The electricity isn’t turned on. A dozen or so elders gather in one room for their weekly services.
These photos eventually became a book, “The Things Not Seen Are Eternal,” which came out in 2023 and I’ve been thinking about lately as I contemplate the role of religion in my life and in society. The title comes from 2 Corinthians 4:18:
“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Dyal, who has become a dear friend over the years thanks to his longtime connection to Frank, speaks so lovingly about this building.
He spent hours alone in the building, wrestling with faith, doubt and awe that after 118 years of serving the community, the church would die soon.
Yet he knows he cannot save it.
“I often did feel a profound presence of people or souls as they moved about,” he said in a Pecha Kucha presentation last year. “The things they left behind seemed to be waiting on them.”
“I fantasized that I might see my mother one more time in one of these darkened rooms if I just kept looking,” he said.
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