When I was listening to Father Dave discussing the machinations of prayer as well as the vestry of the Episcopalian Church, I was mindful of the distinction between the underlying infrastructure of truth and those things which human beings build on top of it.

It appears to me that if we were to build a perfect house, it would be one which we carved out of the earth itself. It would be structured within rock, granite, minerals, and so forth, and would literally be a seamless extension of the infrastructure of the earth itself. While that is not fully integrated with truth, it is certainly fully integrated with the manifestation of truth in the planet earth.

On the other hand, when what we do is build a house on top of the earth, the chances are very strong that with time, we are ultimately going to have that infrastructure challenged in lots of different ways: whether earthquakes, volcanoes, and the simple passage of time which we call erosion.

The only way we can ultimately protect the house is to integrate the house into the earth itself.

When I consider, as an extension, the relationship between spirituality on the one side and the church as the manifestation of that, I see underlying spirituality in the form of one’s personal relationship with the sovereign – and with the divine. On the other hand, churches inevitably are attempting to allow us to create some type of infrastructure on that spiritual truth, in the form of a particular church, such as the Episcopal Church, the Roman Catholic Church, Assembly, and the like. Nonetheless, there is obviously a distinction between spiritual connection on the one side and the church on the other side. The church may come and go, but the spiritual connection between human beings and God does not. In fact, while we can use architecture as a way to sanctify and to amplify underlying truth, architecture is still separate from truth. To that same extent that we can use the church to amplify and sanctify religious truth, it is still distinct from it. It is not always clear within the context of religion whether those religious leaders recognize that distinction.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 8:06 am and is filed under Business, Dynetech, Larry Pino, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.