If you’re going to put your priest through a crash-course in construction management for three years, you’re going to have to suffer some theological reflections on the experience. So here are just a few of the many things that struck me, while overseeing this renovation, as possibly instructive for our development as disciples of Jesus Christ.
All the good stuff happens underground
Well, maybe not all the good stuff. But it was interesting to see firsthand just how expansive the underground universe is that constitutes most of our infrastructure. Gas lines, sewer lines, water lines, drainage lines, geothermal wells, building foundations, water proofing. This is where the longest, hardest, biggest, and most expensive work took place. And yet we live our lives basically oblivious to all of that.
We interact and engage most often just with the surface, which is pretty and polished, but entirely dependent on everything happening underground. It was a good reminder that we need to attend to the underground infrastructure in our own souls which is where most of the good stuff (i.e. important, meaningful, hard, fruitful) happens.
God can certainly be encountered at the surface level, but, in reality, the hard work of nurturing a life of faith and not just a moment of it, requires some deep digging and a lot of time and energy. But it makes all the difference.
Nurturing a life of faith and not just a moment of it, requires some deep digging.
Details matter
This is true in many aspects of life, but it was fascinating (and frustrating) to see how small mistakes or mismeasurements or divergences on some small part of some seemingly insignificant thing led to an avalanche of consequences that one did not foresee.
This is true in our life of faith as well. Doing little things well and attentively keeps us from consequences we can’t necessarily foresee. That little white lie, that little cruel comment, that momentary indiscretion, these allow for cracks in our soul that can slowly start to expand and lead to larger problems down the line. Being faithful in little things is really the test of faith. Most of us (I hope!) will not be tempted to commit egregious sins in our life. But it’s the little things, the little ways we live, that shape our souls and influence the person we become. So remember: details matter.
Building vs planting
As we came to the end of the project and started doing things like landscaping I was struck by this fact: the building (and all its constituent parts) was as good as it was ever going to be. From now on it would be a (hopefully) slow process of deterioration that we would try to slow down as much as possible by very proactive maintenance and repairs. But basically, if you look around at any physical structure, it is somewhere in a process of decay.
However, the landscaping (the trees, the bushes, the flowers) was essentially starting at the other end of the spectrum: they were as bad as they were ever going to look and over time, with care and attention, they would grow, flourish, and amaze. Rather than hold on for dear life trying to forestall the inevitable deterioration that awaited our physical structure, these organic items would only get better with time as their roots got deeper, their branches stronger, their flowers more robust.
This was such an arresting realization that it has changed the way I have started to talk about our life of faith.
We often turn to building based metaphors to try and emphasize how to engage a relationship with God (“sure foundation,” “cornerstone,” “house of God”). And while I appreciate that conceptual frame for its emphasis on the strength and steadfastness of God, I worry an overreliance on it can, in some cases, lead to a fixed, almost defensive, maybe even increasingly brittle approach to belief.
If we conceive of our relationship with God to be a fully formed structure, what happens when that structure starts to crumble, or break, or spring a leak? We scramble to try and patch it up so as not to compromise the building’s integrity and continue to live in fear of the next challenge.
But what if we thought of our relationship with God in more organic terms? Like those little spindly trees around our new driveway which will (again, with care and attention) grow over time, taking the challenges of life into their being: bending with the howling winds, regrowing new branches that break off, absorbing the extra waters when the flood comes, and still, keep growing.
Rather than a defensive, fearful posture against the inevitable chances and changes of life, they are open to them as part of their development. In fact, those experiences become essential to shaping the kind of tree it becomes, which in this case, will be an eventual source of beauty for passersby, and source shade for generations of children who will play and rest under its embrace. Flexibility, longevity, development, growth—these are what these plants can give us as a framework for belief.
Now, of course organic metaphors for our belief in God are already plentiful (seeds, gardens, fruits abound). But based on the experience of this construction project, as much as I adore our glorious physical structures, when it comes to looking for a helpful metaphor for faith, I find myself drawn even more powerfully to that organic example.
I guess what I’m saying, is that I hope, over the course of my life, my relationship with God can be more like those skinny looking little trees than the massively impressive buildings that overshadow them.
