We Make Our Buildings and Our Buildings Make Us

Driving to work one day recently I was listening to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge under the direction of Sir David Willcocks singing the sixteenth-century English composer William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus.  I have sung this piece, and from personal experience can testify how difficult Byrd’s polyphony can be to perform well a capella.  At cuius latus, I was struck by how gentle and caressing Byrd’s phrases are.  The music conjured late medieval images of the grieving women observing the taking down of the body of Jesus from the cross. 

From my earliest memories, art, and particularly music, has been the gateway to the deepest religious feeling, the door to what Friedrich Schleiermacher famously identified as a sense of utter dependence on the source of all.

In his Dawn and Decadence, Columbia historian Jacques Barzun confirms that my experience has been shared by many through the ages.  Most medieval people didn’t think about theology or philosophy.  But the socially-constructed world of medieval Christendom, with its theological grid, simply was reality, and the reality was reinforced by art and story. What medieval Cathedrals, for example, communicated to average people about God, the soul and the nature and destiny of human beings was portrayed vividly in a space that virtually everyone shared. Depth of meaning within this shared world was accessible through art – plastic, musical and literary – and architecture.

Something like this deepening was vouchsafed to me as a child through pictures, books that were read to me and that I read, poetry my grandfather recited from memory, music, movies, buildings and the language of great public orators like FDR, Churchill, JFK, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Senator Everett Dirksen.

Not long ago I attended a dedication service in one of Charlotte’s spotless new Protestant church sanctuaries.  As I settled into my pew, I wondered how much soul-deepening is being conveyed to parishioners by this building and its contents.  The design of the structure is an apt expression of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ of culture paradigm.  It is a shiny, high-tech, pre-fab, industrially manufactured facility.  It was planned for American suburbanites and their idea of what a place to worship should be.  Although the pastor spoke about the holy that day, and referred to the interior space as set apart for an experience of the numinous, I did not sense anything of the sort. God seemed not to be home. As I tried to identify what exactly was awry, two things came to mind:  the omnipresence of factory-manufactured metallic fixtures and electronic conveniences of every kind, and the relative absence of natural woods and fibers. 

The processional cross, for example, was a factory-made, metallic Christus Rex.  Synthetic carpet throughout the room – it covered both the aisles and the floor under the pews and chairs – said these good people believe in practicality and economy – but, and this is important, not simplicity – above all. Both the pastor and the head usher cautioned worshippers against bringing substances into the space that might mar or stain. Praise bands featured well-amplified electronic instrumentation.  What was absent were natural materials, acoustic instrumentation, simplicity of appointment, silence experienced communally as preparation for being addressed by the transcendent through scripture and sacrament and the spirit of human kindness. These things might have invited a sense of the numinous, might have provided context for the possibility of such an experience. But they were absent. And I missed them.

Interior of Third Haven Friends Meeting House in Easton, Maryland, circa 1684.

Taking the Lord's Name in Vain

My father died suddenly 26 years ago today at the age of 61.

My age now is 61. My father was born in 1926.  He was 26 in 1952, the year I was born.  My daughter, who was born just two months before my father died, turned 26 in February of this year. A curious generational chord sounds here. It resonates faintly, but distinctly, in a minor key. I suspect a significance in this that I have so far not been able to plumb. 

As I ponder these interconnections, another generational resonance occurs to me.  In the suddenness of his passing – he worked a full day that Friday in Dallas before dying of a heart attack late that night – my father joined his father and his father’s father in making an abrupt, unexpected exit.  Three consecutive generations in a patriarchal line slipped quickly and without preparation or farewell through a narrow slit in the thin diaphragmatic tissue that separates this world from the other side.  William James in January 1919, William Franklin in April 1988, and, out of generational order, my grandfather, John Lawrence, in February 1989. I would seem to be next in following this family tradition of leaving the party by way of a side door. This prompts a certain amount of sober reflection.

My father loved font design.  This sounds strange as I write it, but he was a typographer. He knew and appreciated the history and design of fonts as they are in themselves and as they are combined on a printed page to produce a desired effect. Recently watching a film documentary on the font Helvetica made me homesick for my father and the shop he and his partners founded, Tradetype of Dallas, Inc. When I try, I can still smell type cases, lead, ink and cleaning fluid, and hear the tinkling of individual brass fonts as a cigar-chewing typesetter released them from the magazine of a Linotype machine to create a molded lead line of type. Working for my father in that shop in the 1960s, I witnessed the last years of hot-metal typesetting for ink presses and the dawn of a new age of electronic, computerized printing. To this day, I am nostalgic for the feel and smell of a page of copy printed from a galley of inked metal type.

I could, and probably should, write much more about ways my father was a blessing to me. The long, bonding silences we shared when we worked together on a yard or a building project. His love of mountain landscapes, seascapes and sailboats. His grace and elegance on the dance floor. The way he loved a good joke. An enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of everything about New Orleans, including, most especially, its cuisine and music. And, not least, his rejection of religion.

The religion my father passionately rejected was the fundamentalism of his upbringing in south-central Oklahoma Churches of Christ. Fundamentalism's unique combination of provincialism, anti-intellectualism, exclusivity, flinty mean-spiritedness and denial of most forms of fun and pleasure became the great hatred of his life. From the day he boarded a train for Navy boot camp, he never willingly attended worship, prayed at meals or contributed money to religious organizations. This caused no little tension between him and my devout, fundamentalist mother.

Understanding my father’s animus toward religion was a formative, compelling, ongoing project – perhaps the formative, ongoing intellectual and emotional project – of my adolescence and young adulthood. In this sense, my father contributed more than he ever knew to his son’s academic work and pastoral ministry.

Irony abounds here. One of the more blatant ironies made its appearance at my father’s funeral. The service in a funeral home was conducted by my mother’s minister, who used his privileged position behind the podium to spend  half an hour preaching my father into hell. Let William Boone be an object lesson to us all, he said. He never accepted Christ and “obeyed the gospel” – a noxious and oxymoronic phrase, as if the apostles intended the Christian euangelion to be a taskmaster instead of a liberation. No, Bill was never baptized. He never joined his parents, sister, wife and children in becoming a member of the Lord's church. And therefore, ask not where his soul is today.  It is in torment, writhing in a lake of fire that will never be extinguished.

I had written this minister an honorarium check for $150 before the funeral service began and after the funeral I didn’t stop payment on it. I wish I had, for I deplored and still deplore what he did. In fact, the service he conducted has for me become emblematic of what the Hebrew Bible means by “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” The Ten Commandments prohibit taking or using the Lord’s name in vain, meaning the use of religion to abuse or harm others.  My family and my father's friends were subjected to a minister intentionally and systematically taking the Lord's name in vain. Which only validated what my father had been saying about religion all along.

Immortal, Invisible, TICM Only Wise

My last post affirmed that religion is a human creation, the result of millennia of human myth-and symbol-making and ritual-crafting.  That unqualified claim left me open to the misunderstanding that I regard religion as merely a human creation.

According to medieval scholastic theology, God is not a being, but the source of all being. What we call God is prior to distinct beings. God is uncreated being itself, from which all separate and distinct beings derive. The limitations of language force those who would speak of God into strange, strained forms as, for example, Transcendent-Immanent Cosmic Mover, the origin of all space, time and matter.  In other words, a reality for which human thought and language have no adequate categories.

Rather than using the word God, with its heavy accumulation of emotional and intellectual baggage, it might be more useful to use another symbol like TICM.

Scientists like Robert Sapolsky and Richard Dawkins will not entertain the hypothesis that TICM could have impelled human evolution toward the development of a religious sensibility.  They won’t entertain it because it is not subject to scientific – that is to say, experimental – proof.  And they are right.  It isn’t.

And yet, as twentieth-century French Roman Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin and others have claimed, TICM could have acted – could be acting – through countless agencies, including the neurobiological capacities of the human brain, to impel us over hundreds of thousands of years to evolve a collective urge, an itch, an ever more refined erotic aspiration toward something that would come to be called divinity, gods, God.  Understood in this way, religion is a mirror TICM prompted and is prompting humans to create to reflect divinity.  Religion is the response in a divine-human antiphonal conversation TICM initiated and continues to initiate.

Whether evolution is purposeful in that sense would seem to be the only real issue in the argument between contemporary scientific atheism and religion.  It is a question that will never be settled.  Belief, on the one hand, and scientific atheism, on the other, are, in the end, personal commitments made without compelling rational proof or demonstrability.  Just as I cannot prove the reality of TICM, a scientific atheist cannot disprove the reality of TICM.

A life based on religious faith is therefore a series of choices, taken over a lifetime, to believe in the reality of a transcendent-immanent purpose mysteriously at work at both macro (beyond) and micro (within) levels. Faith is a decision to affirm a “something more” or a “something behind” the kaleidoscope of what we can apprehend with our senses in time, and to tailor our actions in the world to reflect that belief.  

I choose to believe in that sense, even as I sympathize with those whose commitments are otherwise.