Concentric Circles

Monday @ Montpelier: September 30

Love, but Hold Loosely

This morning, more than 900,000 people are without power in the western part of my state. An unfathomable amount of people are today without water, food, power, a home. I have minimal, spotty contact with my parents: they are still at my childhood home, massive trees fallen on and around it—and theirs is mild hurricane impact compared to thousands around them. Here I sit, in my quiet little city, generally unharmed by the storm, spending a sizable portion of my time, money, home, and resources to facilitate a quiet space for the spiritual exploration of about 5-10 children.

There’s nothing like tragedy to make one evaluate their beliefs and priorities.

I am thinking in circles today, about the overlap and connectivity of the tangible with the intangible. Witnessing the devastating, permanent loss due to Hurricane Helene, I can’t help but think about the folly of investment in the tangible—how quickly and completely the material can be swept away. If our attachment in this world is primarily to the physical, we will be utterly unmoored when the unthinkable strikes. It’s dangerous to cling to what we can physically touch in this world.

And yet, in the atrium, we are very much concerned with providing intentional materials. I speak often about how our work in the atrium goes far deeper than the materials, and that ultimately, they do not need to be present for God’s presence to meet with us in significant ways. At the same time, a CGS atrium is what it is because of what is in it. To construct an atrium, you follow a manual for making works that includes measurements and materials. Deviation from this manual is usually minor. Isn’t this insistence on particular things limiting? Is it dangerous to connect physical items with spiritual formation?

Around and Around We Go

It occurs to me that our connection with physical matter plays a significant role in the circular movement of our lives. We are passing back and forth between the material and immaterial, the finite and the infinite. Both are always present, but there’s a balance there that I have to believe is intentional. The physical realm helps to frame our spiritual exploration. And our spiritual formation gives shape to the environments our lives touch. These environments, again, speak spirituality back to us…and on and on and on. Both aspects of human experience have been present from the beginning of creation, and both are from the Divine, so they share a center. If we totally eschew one for the other, are we living wholly, as intended?

I think this dynamic between the physical and spiritual may be why I feel so unsettled, often alarmed, by the intangibility of our consumption these days. It’s a bigger question than I aim to tackle here, but allow me to wonder: is this same complementary exchange able to occur in and through virtual spaces, where human senses are either dampened or overloaded, imitated artificially, or completely uninvited? The same might be wondered of our increased use of synthetic materials, taking us further and further from the basic natural elements of the world of and in which we were made.

The inclusion of tangible items in the atrium is unique because it beautifully sets into motion for the child this integrated exchange between the physical and spiritual. Both are important, and in the atrium, they exist in harmony for the child to explore. The children feel at home in that give and take. I talk with many parents who feel concern that their child’s faith will be so grounded in the particular materials of the atrium that they won’t be able to separate their relationship with God from those works as they mature. It’s hard for me to explain what I witness in the atrium to parents because it’s beyond description, but I can say with utter conviction that the child has an innate intuition to the finiteness of the things around them that often protects them from such rigid association. They almost immediately pass through the physical into the unseen realm it represents.

We tend to berate children for their short attention span with toys—my daughter constantly becomes attached to a single stuffed animal that she loves more than anything in the world, only to move on to another love weeks later, forgetting the previous. Is there actually something we’re missing here—something that could we learn from their impulse to such temporary obsessions? What would it be to truly learn from a thing, person, place, moment for a brief span without having to maximize our investments to the -nth degree, as adults are wont to do? Children let go much better than adults do. It’s a practice worth pausing at.

Everything In Its Place

When I talk about the physical world, I am speaking about the things we can perceive with our five senses. Rocks and trees and dirt and rain as well as the materials man creates from these things. Most people don’t have to be convinced to love and enjoy material things. We are addicted, in fact, to having them sent to us in one day shipping. They give us that immediate hit of dopamine. I am not proposing a deeper dive into an obsession for consumption. I am proposing more thoughtful consumption. An attentiveness to a greater purpose for these things that surround us in this life. An intentionality towards what items we choose to accept in our homes and hearts.

I wonder what places in my life I might alter to increase my own balance between right investment in the physical and deep immersion in the spiritual. I want to carefully let each have their proper place in turn like the rhythm of a song played out in my life.

My home, my relationships, my treasures, my body—they are daily deteriorating, moving towards death. Their longevity is limited but their impact is not. Often, they have been distractions and substitute joy. But there have also been so many times that physical things, primarily in the natural world, have shown me the shape and meaning of love. The value of beauty. The expansiveness of grace. The power of being one functioning part of a greater whole. Countless eternal realities that will be present in the New Creation.

I think on these things as I lovingly tend the little potted plants, the ceramic bowls and glass beads and carefully painted wooden pieces of the atrium. God bless and protect them, and may he imbue them with the Holy Spirit that makes their purpose complete. I pray that I would be immersed, as the children are, in the real-time, real-place, touchable excitement that these materials usher us into. Excitement not for the chalice and the paten, or the wooden shepherd and sheep, or the candles they so love to light and snuff and light again. Excitement for the Light illuminating our minds by the struck match. The Water of Life we hear whispering in the gentle trickling of poured water. The Passion tangible in the deep tint and pungency of the red wine. The Embrace of the wrapping tendrils of the well-tended vine.