Caught Between Two Worlds

There are two worlds. The one we all are given, and the one we all try to make. The gift of the first is effortless and impossible to understand. No one asked for or earned the world of beauty that falls into our eyes every day. It is just where we are, including that we are.

But the other would, the world we try to make, is ours to understand, even try to control. Perhaps it is defined as the culture we create, for each of us, but also for all of us. Though a fully uncontrollable world, it triggers a cultural grasp at control. The last three years of pandemic has seen endless efforts to “stop the spread” or “follow the science”. And we seem to have survived.

Eighty years ago, the Greatest Generation lived through the plagues of Depression and World War II. Survival from the world that they did not make resulted in a full-on manic attempt at total control of the controllable — Midcentury Suburbia — including the “Sunday Go To Church” way of worshipping God. So it was natural that their children, Baby Boomers like me, thought that control of the world before us was possible, so the curriculum vitae, children’s college admission, and McMansions became the levers and gauges for that control. The children of Baby Boomers (Gen X and Millennials) for their part harnessed this inheritance of control toward their own self-expression.

Two every-present realities, however, make all of these human efforts to define ourselves completely absurd. The first is with us every day — our inevitable, never-ending failures that render the push to define success comical. The last failure, the failure to live forever is now sitting next to every Baby Boomer.

In the movie The Natural Glenn Close plays Iris Gaines, who loves the flawed Roy Hobbs. She only knows him from their childhood, his first world, and loves him through his wrecked second life. When Roy asks Iris why she loves him despite his broken adulthood, she says:  “I think we have two lives. The one we learn from, and the one we live with after that.”

Like Roy Hobbs, if we were listening, the one world we know, the world we were given, sends all expectation of control to the blooper reel. But we do not listen very well. If humans had control, every building would be a sunset or a baby’s smile, and death would have no sting. But our constructions of aesthetics, religion or law do not determine what is beautiful in our lives. The world we were given, the world we do not, cannot, control is often invisible in our rush to define the world in which we live.

Silent and overwhelming, God’s grace belongs to that first the world, the one we have no ability to understand. Poets, landscapers, baristas and computer programmers, all of us, try to find the beauty we cannot control and live our lives into it. Like water, if we push against what we have been given, nothing happens, but if we are opened by grace, we can find the beauty we seek, because it is just there, waiting for us.

Architects, like me, try to combine those worlds that Iris Gaines describes. Humans make the places we use, but those places exist in the gift of the world that we cannot make. A bit like our lives. We wake up every morning and the unknowable miracle of uncounted cells and connections under our skin affords the perception of the fully miraculous reality.

In this way, architecture is like religion. Beauty is not architecture, and faith is not religion. But architecture is in a full-on desperate exploration of the how, what, when and why of beauty. Making the profane divine is a translation that religion devoutly attempts as well. Rituals, icons, music, words, buildings, or good works all are the devotions humans have to bring to bear on connecting with the unseen world we can never understand but cannot deny.

Having been with God my entire life and architecture for fifty years it is clear that both are faith-based realities, without a grade sheet of validating evidence. The Baby Boomer ethic of unrelenting effort to gain our “personal best” is no different than declaring that beauty is found in a style.

Our inabilities should make faith the essence of our lives, but the world we think we can control always tries to deny the inevitability of faith.

Our lives are spent in the effort to reveal what we have been given. Every artist knows this. The music coming from you, the painting from your hand, the words on a page or just the baby’s smile comes from you, but not by you. The buildings I help make can be more than their construction, more than all those human efforts, but if we are honest, we laborers have no clue of the meaning what we are ultimately creating beyond its answers to the world we seek to control.

The athlete knows that their efforts are by them, not from them. Every parent comes to know that you have nothing to do with the beauty of your children and every responsibility not to betray it.

Our lives, here, are the best way we can understand the two worlds we have. We did not ask to be born, we had our childhood handed to us. Good, bad, mostly not us, all of us were born to places with parents and family we could only react to — like the world that we have been given. But at some point, the world we are given promises the world we can make. The promise of creation, control, even fulfillment is just who we are, how we were made.

Architects, being human, try to drive the square beg of the skills God gave them through the round hole of finding beauty. Just like the disciple Peter recognized, when we are confronted with a situation, we think to build through it: “Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias” (Mt 17:4).

The tabernacles I labor to create try to answer all the needs of the world we seek to control, but those buildings only fulfill the faith in the gifts that I have been given if I am opened to the world I can never understand. No matter how earnest and capable I may be, the outcomes of my work reside in a world that I am unable to control.

The poet Emily Dickinson lived a life that built tabernacles of words. Those words were initially held away from the world in seclusion as she gardened, cooked, and extemporized on the piano. Her tabernacles were most often between her and God, addressing the realities each of us live in every day. In my life her words come from the worlds we have been given — essential, and untouchable:

The definition of Beauty is
That Definition is none –
Of Heaven, easing Analysis,
Since Heaven and He are one.”