The Golden Ass

An Icon (in my home) of The Transfiguration

"Beauty evokes desire. It precedes and elicits desire, it supplicates and commands it, and it gives shape to the soul that receives it." - David Bentley Hart

Yesterday, in reference to a woman's compulsion to be with a man, a friend of mine said, "That's not love." My friend looked up and out towards heaven and then down at their arm, pinched their skin as though in reference to their body, and said, "That is lust." As I try to work through this myself in my discipleship, this statement by my friend really got me to thinking.

The difference between lust and love is not the difference between body and spirit but between faithfulness and transience, caring and carousing, dignifying and degrading, worthiness and temptation, treasure and buried, significance and void, partnering and alienating, creating and wasting away.

Notably both love and lust not only involve but require the gift of beauty. The evoking of desire is not foreign to beauty; that's the whole point. The difference is ordering and disorienting, directing and chaos, living and dying.

Also, I've heard it said more times than I can count that (romantic) relationships are held together only by God. But what does that even mean? When I've heard this in the past, it usually only amounted to saying it, as though merely affirming the correct doctrinal creed in our heads. More concretely, the difference between love and lust is also the difference between owning someone and being on the same path together, between idolatrously identifying by our union with the other and walking upright together before the face of God in worship.

This really applies to any relationship whatsoever, but, because we're talking about lust, we're talking about relationships belonging to the ordering of sexuality in marriage. In other relationships, we could replace "lust" with compulsion and discuss "true friendship" or "fellowship."

For us to enact those in our discipleship and our lives is to love and embody Jesus and his way rather than the way of death. This, of course, means that following Jesus and enacting love rather than lust does not mean reaching for disembodied spiritual realities. For me, in my life and history, I found that such a gnostic quest turned out to itself be lustful and to thus have extremely destructive consequences (including on my sexual life).

Of course, then, all of this is meaningless if Jesus is not Jesus Incarnate, and if Jesus is not beautiful, if seeing and knowing Jesus is not seeing and knowing beauty that evokes bodily desire to know him and his love. The to this point unstated reality here is that Jesus is life, he cares and nurtures, he orders and directs all things, he empowers and grants an inheritance of dignity in himself, and that he is faithful. Jesus Incarnate, rather than an imagined disembodied spirituality, is our peace and our strength.

*Note, I originally wrote this on Dec. 15, 2019 on Facebook after the above noted conversation with said friend.

"Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives; though Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen." - Lectionary prayer for the Week, beginning Sunday, Dec. 29th.

Today, I attended a church in a part of town I wasn't very familiar with while growing up in my two story suburban house in a neighborhood of nearly all white people. I attended a church that apparently can't afford new blinds.

A murderer, thief, and adulterer gave a testimony that he's now a productive member of the community after having been given a life sentence in prison. I thanked him for his story and told him it looks like his life sentence got placed on Jesus at the cross, because he's free. He smiled and shook my hand.

The lady who spoke and witnessed before the offering was previously hooked on crack, in and out of prison, and an adulteress. Appropriately, she shared these verses with her testimony:

"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord 's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn..."
Isaiah 61:1‭-‬2 NRSV

My favorite part of the day, I think, was the greying, pot bellied white guy with a cane and no rhythm who clearly can't dance (in a room full of people who do and can) but was doing so anyway with great exuberation in an environment full of hugs that clearly feels like home for him. I later found out he goes by Pastor Rick.

I was quite moved when I realized that he was like an icon pointing to the exiled and outcast Jesus who identifies with precisely the kinds of people who "don't fit in society" that filled the room.

I saw all sorts of Pentecostal excesses I deemed silly or even disagreeable. Rom. 8: 6 "To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace" got translated instead in terms of "having the carnal mind" vs "having the spiritual mind." The preacher says: "We deal more with anger than we do with submission. When you feel like you're going to 'do something,' then submit...The Devil is not the problem. It's our CARNAL mind. You think somebody owes you something...the flesh don't like to be told what to do. The flesh don't like to behave."

Spiritual gets twisted to mean disembodied. In the sermon, if someone compulsively expresses their anger at me, the pastor's advice is to be sure and not tell them how that makes me feel. To instead go sit in a room and pray. His point is a good one, which is not to respond to compulsive anger with more of the same. To enact the way of Jesus rather than the violent way of the world. But there's no imagination for safely and gracefully befriending our bodily desires and responses so that they may be transformed and reordered in the presence of Christ. One prayer heard was: "We're gonna learn how to close our mouths, Lord God [rather than making others angry]."

But such silliness or disagreeableness is, in a sense, precisely the point of why I enjoyed today and the lessons presented to me as gifts. While I became present to my judgement over what I disagree with or over what I vainly and faithlessly deem below me on the social ladder, they were teaching me how to be human. I was quite moved. The worship leader, with his corny bodily contortions in reference to now unpopular 70's dance moves with a giant, toothy smile on his face, clearly knows what acceptance is. He is clearly comfortable in his own skin and in the presence of other silly, weird people like him, because we're covered by the love of Christ.

Those kinds of people are me. When I say I was moved, I mean to tears. Of repentance.

"The Holy Spirit is not a sad person...you know God has a sense of humor. Look who he called. He called me." - senior pastor George Eison

The Suicide of Judas, ca. 1492, by John Canavesio

I tend to imagine that Judas betrayed Jesus (when he did) EITHER because of vain greed OR because of impatience in waiting for Jesus to fulfill his own (probably violent, militant) idol / image of the kingdom. I am also tempted to think that, all along, Judas was "sold out" EITHER for OR against Jesus. But, Judas' impatience is not disconnected from his greed, and - like Peter - he probably didn't really even know what he wanted. Heck, some fear of the authorities was probably mixed in there with his impatience at overcoming them, too.

If it were as simple and being moved by one desire integrated with its purpose, he wouldn't have needed Jesus to empower him to name and own his desire, to get out of his confused place of disordered paralysis (John 13: 27). This means that, like mine and yours, Judas' desires were not straight forward or of a single purpose. Humans aren't that simple. He likely felt conflicted.

Considering the confusion and disorder, I wonder how Judas would have reacted if he would have stuck around for the end of the story? In a sense, that's a bit of a nonsense and irrelevant question; it's not what happened, and we can't know. But, at the same time, my imaginative exercise of a question does function to articulate my point - which is that the revelation of truth in Jesus Christ is not only required for us to even have any bearings or orientation in relation to our confused mess of desires at all in the first place but also empowers us to own and name our desires, as well. I imagine that, if Judas had seen the resurrected Jesus, his desires leading to betrayal would likely have been drastically rearranged and reoriented.

See Matt. 27: 5 and Acts 1: 25 for context of the meaning of the above painting. I submit that it helps us understand part of why our desires are so difficult to understand or even see. It's because we're not gods. We don't create our desires and don't get to control them from above like a machinist. Instead, our hearts are gates between kingdoms. We are ever under the influence of and shaped by other forces and images of and for reality. We can't serve both God and money. Either way, however, we are servants. Just before Jesus empowers Judas to know and act on his desire, in fact, Jesus commands us to act as servants to one another (after serving us by washing our feet).

To precisely my point that the revelation of Jesus is the revelation of our disordered desires, from Matt. 27: 3 When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. 4 He said, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”

Revelation of the king reveals where we are in relation to the kingdom. "Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known." - 1 Cor. 13: 12

"The impossible burden of expectations for hope, peace, joy and love in a carefully orchestrated mood will break on the craggy rocks of reality - very likely today, if not certainly tomorrow, when our commercial Christmas ends and the liturgical season is just beginning. Rather than fighting that reality I have learned to embrace the fact that my understanding of Christ’s promises of hope, peace, joy and love depend on an awakening of despair in the alternatives. Thanking God for my disillusionment this morning, and imagining a community that welcomes that poor in spirit, forgives terrible sins, restores the children to their parents, carries the suffering of the forgotten and recognizes the delicate working of omnipotence in the tenderness of the weak - because this is where the Child is truly our king." - Sharad Yadav

*image from @monetnicolebirths on Instagram
I wrote the following on Christmas night, as Sharad wrote the above on Christmas morning. It's an account of how my day went. For those who don't know, Christmas goes until January 5th according to the Church calendar. So, I'm not actually late here.

To paraphrase of Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke, founders of Gravity Leadership: "We don't just think our ways into new ways of living. We also live our ways into new ways of thinking." I have been discipling with them for a while now. I am learning that the groaning of creation on Christmas morning isn't a reaching out to grasp something beyond but, instead, is the embracing of our weakness and vulnerability, our limits.

Today, I set boundaries for the first time in my life. I also apologized for "violently" overstepping boundaries with my own harsh words in the past in that relationship.

Suddenly, in certain circumstances, I am able to imagine more healthy verbal responses where, before, my imagination was enslaved by my compulsion to responses that would be merely either helplessly passive or self-assertively aggressive. I am Zechariah. I was mute, and am now able to speak.

Then, I also suddenly found myself apologizing to two dear friends for a pattern in the past of being super pushy in forcing them to see what I saw or, to quote Matt Tebbe again, "want what I want." I was previously bound to frustration with them, and to the circumstances around my relationship with them, rather than acting out of a desire to love them by seeing them empowered as co-creators with God. I felt controlled by colonizing and imperial forces. Today, I enacted the way of peace. "We don't just think our ways into new ways of living. We also live our ways into new ways of thinking." (see Romans 8: 19-23)

Indeed, I feel like a new child has been born today, like it's Christmas morning. That child is me. A very difficult and draining day was a great gift. The groaning of all creation as though in childbirth lives in the appearance of the person of Jesus when he is working to free us us from old patterns of enslavement. A joyous morning and the power to speak creatively, the inheritance of the Christ child.

Luke 1 and 2:

18 Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” 19 The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. 20 But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”
....
7 Then [after the birth of the child] his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy:

68 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
69 He has raised up a mighty savior for us
in the house of his servant David,
70 as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
71 that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.
72 Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,
and has remembered his holy covenant,
73 the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,
to grant us 74 that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,
might serve him without fear, 75 in holiness and righteousness
before him all our days.
76 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
77 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
by the forgiveness of their sins.
78 By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Merry Christmas everyone. Shalom.

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

- from Angel Surrounded by Paysans, by Wallace Stevens

Silver Censure, c. 1400-1500, made in Germany, once belonging to Basel Cathedral

We’ve heard of literal readings of the bible. We’ve heard of “spiritual” or “theological” interpretations of the scriptures. Someone caught wind of such a thing as a “figurative” reading and was wondering what on earth that means. This is easy for me to identify, because I first learned it through the language of architecture. It’s not super new, complicated, or profound. But, one thing that's interesting to me about this is the way figures who appear in our built environment can teach us so much about textual interpretation. Hermeneutics is not and doesn’t have to be just a lesson in a text book.

Imagine the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a modern factory or skyscraper. Interestingly, new communities – or forms of community - gathered around both.

In the Gothic cathedral, figures appear before our senses. In fact, the entire edifice becomes a con-figuring. You begin to see heads, feet, eyes, mouths - generally various body parts in compositional relationship both with one and other and with the earth and heaven.

The body parts that especially being to bring figures into relief for us are either the ones that emerge out to us from the flat contours of the skin of the body or the ones that open orphically to our depths: brows, lips, and feet, or mouth and eyes. Things that tend to cast shadows down towards the earth from the light above. This becomes fairly clear in the image of the censure above.

As figures that appear before our senses illumined by light, they clearly are representative, pointing to something above or beyond themselves. Just because “figurative” reading isn’t necessarily in accordance with the rules of wooden literalism does not mean that there is no room for miracles, the supernatural, etc. In fact, miracles are actually a “figural” in breaking of or pointing to the kingdom.

In a Gothic Cathedral, the materiality of the stone itself, as well as its having been gathered elementally from an actual place, is important and bears upon our senses in ways that are foreign to modernity. This is "plain sense" reading of scriptures in favor of or over against “the spiritual” readings of, say, a literal dispensationalist. In a Gothic Cathedral, stone, even the very materiality of the stone itself, is not degraded but elevated – quite actually. The figures that appear in and through the silver thurible appear much more easily before us “in person” than in photography. In discipleship, bodily desires are not degraded and trashed but befriended and transformed.

Notably, this elevating – or resurrecting - of the material body only happens as part of the composition of a whole whose parts, if taken away, would both be degraded themselves and leave the beauty of the whole as something other than what it is. It's the community that Peter is referring to as the Temple of God rather than modern individualists. The censure is elevated as a microcosm of the cathedral rather than as an independently atomized molecule. The same goes for scriptural figures who are types to Christ.

This simultaneous importance of what is sensed and its appearing as a literary figuring into a larger (communal) narrative - a narrative that is not contained only in a book but in "the world" itself - is because the cathedral is a configuring of the union of heaven and earth. It's a figure of revelation in the person of Jesus standing upon the earth.

Tomorrow is Never, 1955, by Kay Sage

The modern factory or skyscraper, however, appears as a mechanical box or a representative graphic grid superimposed over a piece of paper - and definitively not upon a palimpsest but a blank slate. No body parts appear, either in figurative relationship with one another, or in relationship to heaven and earth. We only see anything more than that in older factories, like in Savannah, Georgia, as a holdover practice, as traces of ancient tradition. Modern cathedrals are composed only of doors and windows, stones and glass.

This is “wooden literalism,” where, for example, what might actually be rhetoric about hell - that makes sense as such in the presence of a community of actual human bodies with an imagination that guides us to living according to the words we hear and images we see that evoke bodily desires in and through time - can instead only be a highly technical propositional lecture about the doctrine of eternal conscious torment in a context dislocated from any particularities of time, place, or the human body.

So, though the materiality of modern “cathedrals” or of our “wooden literalism” is the entire and only point of them, said bodyliness hardly "matters" at all in any meaningful sense. Stone is not itself elevated but plastered onto a structural grid as a shiny mirage. The actual body that appears does so as a distant object of our gaze from above. Or, more accurately, the body appears only as a possibility, a concept, a half formed figure draped over by our dislocation from it.

In comparison with a modern “cathedral”, it becomes notable that any reflectivity or shiny, cosmetic splendor of the stone of a medieval sanctuary comes more from natural wear over time – like in Abbey du Thoronet, for example - than from human intention to immoderately and loudly reach and call towards the heavens like the Tower of Babylon. This Babylonian cosmetic line bought and worn by our modern “cathedrals” is “wooden literalism” that particularly serves our overly spiritualized readings of scripture that turn humanity and our ends into essentially disembodied spirits floating on clouds. This is a theology and method of interpretation that, in fact, wasn’t born until after the particularly modern “cathedrals” came onto the scene.

In historical-critical interpretation, reading of scripture is not itself sacramental, is not itself the embodying of the narrative told in said scripture (microcosmically, like a thurible / censure). The factory or skyscraper appears either as pure representations of the products produced that point to their value according to their master the market, or as purely the pragma(tic) brute mud of a machine's immanence. Modern “cathedrals” correspond to either the massive mountain of textual scholarship that exists on its own conceptual plane or to the human author's singular intentions on which that conceptual system relies.

Historical critical reading requires and is dependent upon this kind of speculative distance from the "original autographs" that no one has ever seen, like an engineer's calculations in relation to a factory or skyscraper that doesn't yet exist, with the end product of a building that appears to the senses as a big hunk of existentially novel - and necessarily novel and new - Nothing and Void. Such newness is a large burden to bear for us modern writers or producers of Anything. This process of modern production of artifacts of meaning is unlike a medieval architect, who crafted in relation to an existing model - as in reference to discipleship / succession - with the end product being a type of the one that came before.

This whole piece to this point is an extended analogy between cathedrals and textual interpretation. The information here is nothing new or groundbreaking to many. What's interesting to me about this analogy, however, is that it points to the worlds of difference between figurative and historical-critical reading. I’m also interested that, by the very fact of its being an analogy, it thereby plays with the difference between figurative and historical-critical reading.

Who Do You Choose To Disciple You?

Who are the figures or persons who come to mind as the historical catalysts or teachers of these different ways of reading scriptures or building buildings? In one time and place, they were people working on projects in situ. Now, however, they are historical figures who are built into the narrative of how we live and who thus represent to us elements of life in our world that we treasure. Darby and Scofield, Origen and Augustine? Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler and William Le Baron Jenny? The architects of medieval cathedrals come known to us anonymously, explicitly know only for representing something figuratively beyond and above them selves. History itself can appear either in figurative relief or, rather, as a set of technical propositions made of mechanical beams of engineered joints.

One might now be inclined to ask: does this analogical set of relationships between ancient and modern cathedrals and methods of textual interpretation have bearing on the way we live our lives? Why and how do the figures of ancient or modern theologians or architects speak to us about how to live? Is this analogy anything other than a thought experiment? As my friend Peter Bell said it:

“Can we live our lives as sacramental representatives of a larger narrative rather than as historical/critical minions of the material creations of our own hands (and machines)? Do we have this choice (without going back to work at the literal medieval cathedral)? If so, how?”

I would like to suggest that the whole “point” of the analogy here is to explore and reveal how that’s precisely what we’re all doing anyway. We’re all making that choice every day, and we don’t have to literally “go back” and work in an actual medieval cathedral to do it. Even those who live and die by historical critical interpretation or by a world of mechanical beams suspended in tension from one another live as embodied figurative representatives of a larger story. As a nurse, I quarantined myself into a classroom for years to get my license, but I actually learned to practice nursing as part of a historical community providing medical care through time - with the guidance of nursing and other medical figures ever before me along my way. We’re all being discipled into a story. The only question is, which one?

People have referred to factories or skyscrapers as "modern Cathedrals" for a reason. If we read the scriptures "figuratively," then why would we not read a factory "figuratively", as well? I had nursing figures ever before me, and factory workers have their figures ever before them, also. As modern "secularists," we are actually embodying a liturgy, a "larger narrative." We just tend not to think of it that way, because that very narrative was originally articulated in explicit contradiction to and rejection of the ancient way. So, we all embody the story of a giant, supposedly rationalized market. That's the reality of our situation. It’s perhaps like a monster, like Godzilla or King Kong. That's a figure.

If we're called to follow in the footsteps of the person or figure of Jesus, then, accepting the reality of our situation, how are we - or can we be - elementally formed (so to speak) towards the building of a different kind of Cathedral? How are we formed with the gifts of the Spirit rather than by monstrous or Babylonian desires that shape us in accordance with the market / consumerism? As disciples, we tend to quarantine ourselves to the text in a classroom to study a mountain of historical textual criticism to then apply that information to the brute mud of our behavior, but we actually learn to embody or to begin to make appear the figure of Jesus in the world by practicing his way as members of his historical community in the world (the "mountain" is figurative in this sentence, btw). What figures do we hold before us as we practice this "Way" of Christ?

* Note: I took both of the above photos during my trip to New York City in September, 2018. I believe I took both at The MET, but the surrealist painting may have been at MOMA.

“God has invited us into a rich, integrated…discipleship, but many of us insist on…involving only our knowledge and behavior. We use rules, bribes, threats, punishments, deals, barters, cages, leashes, etc. to keep ourselves in line, but find that our desires always lead us away and into trouble. No rule is big enough to shape our desire – it just cages desire until it eventually works its way out.” – Gravity Leadership Workbook, p. 98.

With Gravity Leadership, I’m learning how to better tune with and integrate the desires of my body with my discipleship into the love of Jesus. To allow my desires to be transformed in Christ rather than simply or only stifling or fulfilling them in my own efforts. The above quote speaks to how we tend to function as though or imagine that some alien, monster, or machine from outside ourselves is imposing rules upon us to constrain or punish us.

That this tuning into the desires of the body rather than ignoring or killing them is not completely foreign to me is yet another way that I continue to be thankful for my Architectural education, despite having left the profession years ago. I suspect and hope that it can begin to enlarge and quicken the imagination of others, as well, and thus possibly help others get beyond our predominant framework that merely pits passive obedience against authentic self expression.

It was actually Architecture that began to teach and train me to access and tune to the desires of my body towards the appearance of a wholly integrated image of humanity in the world rather than working towards either, on the one hand, a fully mechanized or controlled architecture that imagines us as robots or, on the other hand, a “lawless” architecture that disintegrates and doesn’t hold together as a harmonious whole or beautiful thing in the world that imagines us humans as unbridled animals.

I now realize, looking back on my time as an Architect, that I was trained into an image of a “noble” man as an extension or exercise of the power of the aristocracy – or even patriarchy – that functions differently from the rule of the love of Jesus that turns the world’s powers on its head. To that point, pictured above are the following:
- A plan and section of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, an aristocratic Villa in the hills of Italy;
- A drawing of Le Corbusier’s infamous Modulor Man, which was a tool he developed to regulate the ratios and proportions of his buildings based on those of what he took to be those of the “ideal man”;
- A photo of Windsor Castle, which images for us how the figurative nature of architecture can beautifully reflect back to us as a mirror to the humanity who made it (here, mouths, eyes, heads, and bodies begin to appear wondrously before our senses).

That image of a “noble” man definitely bore painful fruit in my life. That’s a long story that I’ve told elsewhere. That the architectural guild shaped me to imagine humanity differently from how Jesus “rules,” however, doesn’t change the fact that I remain thankful for how I was given the gift of the beginnings of an imagination for how the “rules” that govern what appears in the world don’t have to be imposed from outside but, instead, are the “rules” inherent to humans in the first place.

In the image of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, my own geometric “regulating lines” superimposed over the architect’s drawings reveal that the building’s appearing in the world is governed by the famous “golden ratio” that is found throughout nature (look it up if interested). The mathematical Fibonacci sequence may be more familiar to many, but some may not know that said sequence actually generates a set of analogous ratios of the “golden mean.”

To my point here about both the integration of our body’s desires in discipleship (i.e. how the “rule” of the world in Jesus is a rule inherent to humanity itself) and on how the “regulating geometry” of architecture began to teach me about this, the “regulating lines” in that drawing of Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man are the very same exact ones as mine in the drawing of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda. Le Corbusier learned architecture from Palladio, and the geometry of Corbusier’s buildings is the geo-metry of the human body. The rectangle that discloses the “rules” that govern Le Corbusier’s drawing is a “golden” one – a “golden rectangle” of the “golden ratio.”

So, it turns out – who knew!? - the “rule” inherent to the human body is the same as what governs beautiful architecture. No one is imposing anything on anyone from outside like a monster, alien, or machine. By way of a golden analogy to our discipleship, Jesus, after all, is himself fully God and fully human. His law of love is not imposed upon us from outside ourselves. Torah is at least as much descriptive as prescriptive.

Begrudging obligation does not have to be pitted against authentic self expression. An organically formed lump of clay is not pitted against the mechanical rigidity of clockwork. Being “ruled” doesn’t have to be the harsh imposition of a mechanical or purely pragmatic grid from above. Just as the regulating geometry of man IS the regulating geometry of beautiful and harmonious Architecture - and just as a beautiful image of the figure of humanity appears in the wonder-inducing forms of Windsor Castle as the end product of loving craftsmanship by the humanity who appears in it - the rule of God IS the “rule” of man in harmonious relationship with one another in community that splendors with the beauty of truth.

Architecture really just functioned as a beginning of this lesson for me. And, it's a lesson I'm learning to lean into, now more particularly with a posture of vulnerability before God who's goodness and love I can trust in relationships with others. So, despite my mere initiation into the lesson, I hope this can, if needed or wanted for you, be a springboard for your imagination to see discipleship through a different lens than perhaps the one you're used to.