Towers of Babel

After an allusion to Babel, it seems a bit sacrilegious to begin with the great cathedrals of Europe, but if you'll pardon the poor transition, there's a point here.

When I first traveled to England, my friends and I had the opportunity to wander around the Durham Cathedral, a beautiful example of late Romanesque architecture that was built largely in the early 1100s and completed by 1135. Perhaps it is easy to criticize the medieval church-builders, who robbed parishioners of ludicrous sums of money in order to build unnecessarily massive structures with no function aside from community worship and the housing of relics. We certainly have little sympathy or understanding for the kind of mindset that produced the likes of this and other great European cathedrals. But at the same time, there is an undeniable beauty to the soaring heights of the nave with its massive pillars and ribbed vaulting, something that takes your breath away even as your soul takes flight on the heavenly sound of a chorus singing the evensong service. A moment's quiet contemplation reveals, as contemplation yields to exultation, why someone might go to the trouble of building such a gargantuan thing at such great cost.

Beauty almost always costs something. Things that last: they cost even more. The Durham Cathedral took 42 years to complete, and as building projects go, that's a fairly short time frame. The famed cathedral of Köln (that's Cologne, for you non-German speakers) was erected over the course of 250 years until building ceased in 1473. It was not completed until 1880. As noted earlier, not only time but also money was required for these projects - money that came out of the pockets of people who were pretty hard up to begin with. While, granted, they may not have shared the vision of their tax-collectors, their sacrifice contributed to the construction.

So what do medieval churches have to do with the tower of Babel?

I don't think that modern man could produce the likes of either those cathedrals or the Genesis tower. There are lots of reasons we could cite, starting with the prohibitive cost and moving on to the ways that religion is perceived and practiced (I will grant that there are modern churches that are ridiculously expensive, but they are rarely the product of years of work and painstaking effort, sacrificing form for function and expediency). But I don't think either of these possibilities really get to the heart of the matter, which is this: how many of us are actually willing to build toward a future that we may not get to see?

One of the most powerful concepts that I took away from my year at IMPACT was the idea of dash management. On your tombstone, there's a bare minimum of information. A name, two dates, and maybe an eloquent epitaph. Oh - and a dash. That's your entire life: a single two inch line carved in stone that will gradually wear away under the effects of storm and season. That's all the time you get in this world, so use it wisely.

But that's really hard advice to follow. We don't see our lives in terms of the dash. We see them in terms of the day to day. I'll be the first to admit that my projects are tiny. Most of the time, I'm lucky to get through the weekly chore of doing my laundry, so forget about planning a cathedral. If I can't even get my clothes onto hangers before the basket fills for the next round, I doubt I'm going to have the foresight to transcend my everyday life and enter the greater perspective of human history.

And yet, we're cheating ourselves out of so much if we get hung up on the small things. They're important too, don't get me wrong, but they're not necessarily ends in themselves. Their pleasure is fleeting, evanescent. The joy I take in steaming a perfect, velvety microfoam - and drinking the scrumptious latte that it goes into - is momentary and easily forgotten. We can and should submerge ourselves in these kinds of delights every now and again, but they can't be everything because ultimately, the foam dissipates and the mug is empty. They can't satisfy forever. And when we get stuck on the small things to the extent that we can't sacrifice their comfort anymore and can't see beyond them to the bigger picture, then we've lost something equally precious, which is the opportunity to contribute to and participate in something that will last beyond ourselves and our tiny moments, which, though lovely, are mere nanometers on an all-too-short dash.

I don't want to build a cathedral. But I hope that I don't get so wrapped up in little things that I never get to be part of something bigger than myself, something that might some day, hundreds of years from now, cause someone to pause and think, This is a good thing.