The Golden Ass

“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.