Spiritual Lessons from Buildings

I am thinking a bit homes today. Suzanne and I have thought a bit more about them as we age. United Methodist clergy do not generally get to buy a home during their careers, so it becomes an issue as one moves ages.

However, this is a dangerous road for me to travel. I am not a builder. Consequently, what I say here may not be right. I hope the articles to which I refer are right. In any case, I hope the spiritual lessons I draw will make sense.

 

I recall being on a mission trip to South Carolina several years ago. We were working on a home on John’s Island. Several persons said it would have been easier to build a new home. I asked Bruce, our project leader, about that observation. His response was simple. “The foundation was good.” Therefore, we ripped out almost everything for the week, and prepared the ground for the next work team to start building the home.

A house is so important to us. The building is what you see. You do not see the foundation. Things can go wrong with the building, so wrong that you need a complete re-do, but if the foundation is present, you have something with which to work. Yet, the most important aspect of the house is that it become a home for a person or family. It becomes the hub of activity and rest.

I thought of this as I read an article about the collapse of a house in Maine. I can just hear the soil engineer say, "There's a solid ledge under this dry ground." He was planning to put a fine home on the cliff's edge over the salt water along the coast of Maine. I have found many images of houses in Maine along the coast. Most of them do fine. In this case, I can imagine the contractor came with his backhoe in tow and dug until he hit solid ledge. The cement truck followed, then came carpenters who built, and then the builder sold the house. The house became a home for a family. Sadly, twenty years later, after the sea had done its secret work, a rain from an offshore hurricane came to wash away the remaining silt and sand from beneath the so-called solid ledge. Half of the home tumbled down into a huge and sudden hole where once there was solid ledge. One can imagine the homeowner wringing his hands at the sight of his house sinking to the bottom of the bay. He had lost his home.

Another image of the home has been the home foreclosure crisis. Many communities have desolate houses. Mortgage owners sometimes force out those who live in the home. Sometimes, the owner thinks they must abandon the home, giving up on trying to make the payments. Moreover, we know how things often go from there: With no one tending them, the buildings start to crumble, eaves begin to sag, windows get smashed, mold becomes a problem, yards become overgrown and vandals, squatters or drug dealers add to the deterioration. The houses begin to die and so do the neighborhoods in which they sit.

For most of us, I suspect, desolate homes create some sadness. They are a sign that something is wrong, very wrong. The foundation might be solid, but one did not care of what one built upon it. The foundation may have looked good, but time and life reveal the foundation was weak. Of course, the building relies upon a family caring for it. If something has gone wrong in the economic wellbeing of the family, they may have to abandon the house.

Is it natural for us to have some sadness when someone loses a home? A home is a large investment financially. When something goes wrong there, the family will go through much upheaval and dramatic changes. The family might go to a new house, but it will take some time to make it a home. 

We might consider the difficulties of another building. 

Take the Italian engineers trying to save the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for example.

The work on the tower began August 9, 1173. The builders, contractors, engineers and architects did not mean to make it lean. They designed the tower to be perpendicular. However, tilting became a problem. So for centuries, the 177-foot-tall Tower of Pisa has looked like it is about to fall over. The combined weight of all the marble stones pressed onto and into the soft, silted soils, squeezing water from clay underneath, bulging into the dense sand beneath. This tower teetered on the extreme edge of disaster for 800 years. All 32 million pounds of marble constantly verged on collapse. Its 5.3 degree tilt is startling, even shocking - a full 15 feet out of plumb.

Finally, computer models proved that the tower was going to fall - sooner, rather than later - and a committee of engineers and scientists set about to right the tilting tourist trap. Thanks to some hi-tech engineering the Leaning Tower is now moving, centimeter by centimeter, in the right direction. Engineers are removing bits of clay from beneath the tower through long, thin pipes, at about a shovelful or two a day. By removing these small amounts from the right places, the tower is tilting back toward stability. It is not a perfect or a permanent fix, but sometimes that is the best that can be done with ancient buildings - or even a living church. Engineers believe that they will be able to bring it back by 20 inches, which is enough to save the structure for several centuries. Of course, it will still lean a little - preserving the tourist trade for tilting tower towns. This is by design. The Pisa makers do not ever intend to bring the tower into a perfectly upright position!

We have a lesson here for church and Christians. God does not expect that any of us will reach moral perfection. God does expect us to listen the witness God has given us in the Bible. God expects us to be faithful in aligning our lives with that witness. Of course, we are fallen creatures. We are “crooked timber” as Immanuel Kant put it. We are capable of so many great things, and at the same time so deeply flawed. Each of these stories reminds us, I hope, that spiritual health is not always easy to detect. Foundations are important, even if most people do not see them. It reminds us that the center is not in us, but outside us. Even if the foundation is largely in order, we can mess up in the decisions we make as to how we live our lives.

The beautiful thing is that God is the master builder, if only we would listen.