I took a brief but thrilling architecture class, and I remember the professor on the very first day posing us a question: What do our buildings say about us? If you walked into an ancient Greek city, what would you know about the people who lived there? You’d see a great amphitheater and know that community and the life of the mind and the arts were very important to them. You’d see a well-organized market square and know that commerce was well-developed and important to them. You’d see athletic fields and gymnasia; their presence would tell you that physical health and sport were important to them, and their relative location and beauty would tell you that they were somewhat less important perhaps than the life of the mind. What about religion? Where are the temple or temples? Look up there... way up there at the highest point of the city. You know from miles away what matters most to these people. Growing up here, it would have been reinforced a hundred or a thousand times a day, subtly and subconsciously, that religion is what’s most important.
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| Acropolis of Athens by Leo von Klenze |
Sometimes in capitol cities this architectural messaging is acknowledged, and there are actual laws limiting the height of buildings. No building is allowed that will out-rise or otherwise eclipse the seat of government, including churches. Isn’t that interesting? There’s a claim being made there.
What’s true of cities and buildings is also true of your soul. Something occupies the highest place. Something is on the high hill in the middle of town. There are lots of things that are important to you, lots of competing priorities. It’s precisely to sort out these priorities and to organize your attention that you have to have some organizing principle, some single priority that commands all the others. That’s a philosophical way of saying what Jesus says better and clearer: “No one can serve two masters.”
So what is it that you serve above all?
One answer is the refusal to serve any principle. “I do whatever I want.” But it backfires, and you end up a slave to your appetites. You go through life not as a superman forging your own path, but as a beast, merely reacting to impulses and urges and appetites. And it leads to great misery in the end, because deep down you long to be so much more than that.
It’s easy to beat up on the usual suspects, and preach against people who seek power above all, or who seek money above all, or who seek physical beauty above all. I suppose there may be a few people around who really live that way, but I don’t think I know any. Aren’t those caricatures? Do you really know anyone who would, for example, sacrifice his family to have more money?
No, the real competitors are a little trickier than that. Let’s repeat the architectural experiment with our
Now, get this: isn’t this exactly the example Jesus preaches about in the Sermon on the Mount? Don’t make preparedness for tomorrow your highest priority. I don’t think he’s saying it’s worthless. Is preparedness good? You bet. It’s good not to get caught without any gas when you need to bug out. It’s good to have a flashlight by the bed. It’s good to have insurance to prepare you and your family for all sorts of eventualities. None of that is under dispute… but is preparedness the highest good? Nope. And if you make it the highest good you will end in disaster. Because… guess what… it won’t work. I mean not forever. Your time will be over, as Jesus rather bluntly points out, and if your life was mainly about security, you’ll have to chalk it up as a failure.
Here’s what our Lord says, summing it all up. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well.”
See, Jesus isn’t saying you should sacrifice security and family and friendship and all the other wonderful things in life, renouncing them all in favor of God. What he’s saying is that if you put God first, and only if you put God first, then the rest will follow.
If your heart is set above all on being beautiful, you’re pretty much doomed. You’ll have a crummy relationship with God and you know what? You won’t even be beautiful, not really. But set your heart first of all on God, and you will be a beautiful person.
Set your heart above all on amassing wealth, and you guessed it: you’re doomed. It’ll never be enough and you’ll miss all that’s best in life and in the end you’re dead anyway. But set your heart first on God, and you’ll discover you’re the richest person on earth. See how this works? We could do this with anything. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all the other goods you seek will fall into place.
C.S. Lewis put it nicely: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
Maybe you’ve heard about this classic demonstration. The students go into class one day and on the teacher’s desk is a big jar, and a few big rocks, and some gravel, and some sand. So the teacher scoops the sand into the jar, where it settles in filling the bottom third. Then she scoops in the gravel, which fills the middle third on top of the sand. Then she turns to the big rocks, but there’s no room. They won’t fit.
She dumps it out, separates the gravel from the sand, and starts over. This time she places the big rocks in first. Clunk. Then the gravel, which falls in the crevices around the big rocks. Then, finally, the sand, which filters in around the rest. And it all fits. And the moral is simple. She says, “Big rocks first. It’ll all fit, but it’ll only fit if you put the big rocks first.” In other words, “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well.”
It’s easy to let God slip out of first place. It can happen in such a way that you barely notice. Has any Christian has ever consciously decided: "I'm going to put career advancement ahead of my relationship with God?"I doubt it. Does it happen? All the time. Has any Christian family ever set out to make sports, or grades, or talent more important than God? I doubt it. But it happens - all the time. How many parents have I heard say that they don’t make their children come to Church or to Sunday School because they want it to be their choice? I ask, respectfully, do you give them a choice about going to school the other days? Do you give them a choice about going for a dental check-up? “Of course not.” Why not? “Well, those things are… necessary.” Exactly.
For many Christians in our world, the stakes are much higher. Please remember always that there are many Christians in the world who are risking their lives and their families’ lives to do what we are doing right now. They are our greatest witnesses, the bravest among us in the Body of Christ, who show what it really means to seek God above all. Above security. Above opportunity. Above social acceptance. Above safety.
If I could look into the architecture of your soul, what would occupy the high hill in the center of town? When you’re filling up the jar of your life this week, what will be the first thing given its place?
I’m excited about the trend in Catholic church-building back toward soaring, vertical buildings, because they say something that’s good to say. I’m excited that a cross will rise high over where we’re standing. It will be the highest building in Gallatin County. Everyone will see from miles away what matters most to the people who live here. As Catholics we celebrate and acknowledge that stone and glass and steel can bear witness to truth. But let this witness not be a lie! Because the cross high in the air only matters as a sign of what is in the hearts of the people who raised it.
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