A modular composed faith vs brittle and crystalline one
Maybe one way to avoid building crystal castles in the sky is to share your structure with someone who doesn’t give a shit and is too busy building their own castle to notice the subtle beauty with which your crystal castle is built. Yours is a magnificent cathedral and theirs as an austere and bare Protestant church. Or maybe you’re the one who sees yourself as the Protestant reformer.
The Protestants are aptly named. They spawn denominations over their disagreements. Maybe it’s not so much that they protest. It’s what they do after a disagreement. There’s little attempt at reconciliation. Division is the norm. The printing press made the Bible available to everyone. Preaching was still limited because the cost of sharing your insights was still non-zero. The internet makes everyone a preacher.
Maybe we should go further: abandon the churches. Everyone is his own preacher. We have the technology. If everyone is a preacher, everyone can ignore the theology coming from authority. We don’t need access to the original Greek. We need no mediators. We have access to translations, commentary, and interpretations. Best of all, we’re not locked-in to historical precedent. You can pick and choose, or reject entire floors of their crystal castles. They’re worried their castle will collapse. You, on the other hand, have no such fear. You are building from scratch.
What’s possible with religious interpretation of the future is impossible to predict, but I can give you an idea of what can be possible. First, you can be Protestant in many ways except that you believe in monasteries and have no objection to Christian icons. Iconoclasm doesn’t have to mean something to you personally. The theological distinctions between religions don’t mean much to average Christians anyways.
Anyways, this is all to say that crystal castles are dangerous and brittle. When they crash, everyone in them suffers death by a thousand cuts. In my critique of crystal castles, I’m hardly able to contain my desire to find yet another way in which I can reuse the picture. I love crystalline structures, and you do too. They’re beautiful.
What we want are chandeliers. A crack in one crystal shouldn’t affect the others. The light dances across them. Chandeliers are modular and composable. Composed. That’s a nice word. I’m not merely using chandeliers because they’re both beautiful and made of crystal.
When it comes to logical systems, crystals are great examples. Logic either works or it doesn’t. Code works this way. Many creations in our lives, however, aren’t like that at all. Everything has some give. There are acceptable margins of error, or tolerances. The moulding on walls and doors isn’t just beautiful, it buffers mistakes; it seals the seams. The law is good when applied judiciously and not automatically. The law is made for us, and not man made for the law.
It’s interesting what our architecture says about our ideals. Modern homes are “perfect”, but old homes are “good” in comparison. Perfection is crystalline. The walls are simple. The architecture is imposing and unforgiving. You don’t feel comfortable in a modern home, but you are impressed. Modern construction judges you. It glares at your acne. It seeks to make itself visually distinct from you. You are a mere disease-ridden rat. The home is God’s temple.
The desire for beauty is powerful but shouldn’t be tucked into the corners of society dedicated only to the deserving among us. When you enter a beautiful church, you’re in awe. You’re humbled because the church isn’t there to exclude you but to inspire the best in you. The moulding covers its flaws from your eyes. It cover’s its sins the way Adam and Eve covered themselves when they have acted against the will of their creator. It humbly knows that its purpose is to serve, and not to be served. The big difference is in focus. The moulding may even draw attention to itself as we might cover ourselves in fashionable clothing. We want our society to have some give. We want it to work for us rather than to judge us. It should inspire the best in us. It should help us to become more perfect.
The difference in approach is striking. We believe we have achieved perfection when all the pieces fit together in perfect harmony. We like “oddly satisfying” videos. We do this because we lack conviction. If we had conviction we’d lay out the big elements and know the details will more-or-less sort themselves out.
We think that what it takes to build important things is to create a perfect work. I our striving, we find ourselves falling short. We cannot forgive ourselves our own sins. We know we’re capable of more and yet we feel so far off. We want to accomplish more than the past generations. Ah, but look at their brush strokes! Mine are better. We go simpler. We go Bauhaus. We go brutalist. Yes, we get it. We’re imperfect; we hate ourselves for it.
This is virgin energy in the bad sense. Perfection in this sense is not the goal. Our creations should help us to become perfect. The creations themselves are merely a means to an end. The crystal castle has to imagine that our purpose is prevent clumsy human error from destroying it. The chandelier is kept up high though it’s less delicate than the crystal castle. The chandelier seeks to delight when you catch rays of its light. It doesn’t ask for much upkeep. It’s up there to be appreciated when you’re ready. The disco ball, by comparison, is ashamed of itself. It hides itself in the dark while still seeking to make itself known. It boils over with light. It’s impressive, imposing, and ugly though it’s technically perfect. It’s a mockery of the real thing while claiming to be merely a distillation. It’s a distillation the way processed food is a distillation. The perfect bread is white, with every air bubble the exact same size.