James 1:17
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
Matthew 5:13
You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.
As people rebuild from the flood and as my own home, (which was not damage by the flood) is no longer habitable during a major renovation, I have been thinking a lot about toolboxes. I have a toolbox I carry to all my jobs and whereas it is very handy, it does not hold all the tools available to me.
When designers and architects go to school, we are given a virtual toolbox. We are taught design principals like balance, repetition, contrast or scale. Next, we practice using the design elements such as shape, texture, and line. Really fun! It is through these processes we create living space.
As God is the first architect, we can also see that the same principals and elements aid in our own spiritual development. We are called to a worshipful balance between serious reflection and joyous exuberance in celebrating our love of the Lord. We repeat the Lord’s Prayer in our worship every Sunday. We understand that good is in contrast to evil; that God’s greatness empowers our diminutive stature; that big or small, heaven is open to all.
Ah, but that is the simple part.
Back at design school, it is in our final years that we begin to learn how to consider and utilize the sense of a space. Called phenomenology, it is perhaps the most difficult to understand and master. We manage phenomena when creating our designs, such as the sense of place one gets from space, the effect of transparency produced by a glass environment, or the control of sound through material and shape.
The phenomenon of transparency is truly mesmerizing to me – I LOVE GLASS! And I am not unique. Glass and the property most readily inherent to it, transparency, has tantalized us, fascinated us and for centuries, has manifested humanity’s spiritual, cultural and political aspirations. But the use of glass in the built environment requires a thoughtful balance. That fact became very real for me during the critique of my first residential design project in graduate school. Eager to pay appropriate homage to my inamorata, I designed a space with few interior walls; transparent floors; fractured glass stairs, cantilevered from the wall; a glass sculptured free-standing shower; and a fully glazed front façade. I thought my critique would be effortless, as jurors swooned in admiration of my ingenuity and the complexity of my design. But let me tell you Pride does go before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall!! No sooner had I pinned my project to the wall, than the questions began. What about privacy? Wouldn’t someone be able to see up the hostess’s skirt as she prepared dinner? What about sound attenuation? How comfortably could someone sleep without some form of enclosure? I quickly realized the object of my passion was not a simple thing, not a straightforward choice, but rather an element that commanded the respect of careful thought and faithful application.
It is the same for spiritual life. Careful thought and faithful application.
Even though it requires the most skill, I think this is the tool God cherishes most; as His saints, it is our experience of Him and the world He has created that brings His divinity to all humankind.
An object appears transparent when light, in the form of electromagnetic waves, passes through a material with minimal inhibition. Opaque materials either reflect light or absorb it, each at a varying degree according to its molecular structure, electrical bond and the presence of structural defects, of flaws. Optically transparent materials do not absorb or reflect any wavelength of light (their flaws are minimal) and therefore we perceive them as clear and colorless.
An object that is closed like a mirror or has flaws within its structure is not transparent; it reflects the light back to the source. God has no need to stare at His reflection; when we are not open to God’s grace and power, when we are riddled with flaws, we return the light to God unredeemed and others lose the experience of the divine. We no longer beam God’s truth, but become “a puzzling reflection, indistinct and blurred.”
In Latin, “trans” means across in the sense of moving from one type of space to another, across a threshold or boundary. “Parent” derives from the verb parere, which means, “to appear,” in Latin; in other words, transparency is the condition of appearing, or coming in sight, across or through something. There is an interesting inference residing in these two simple words because it tells us that we, by definition, are transparent to God, not he to us as we might think.
What exactly do I mean by that? I mean that God is seen, He is experienced, by others when He appears to them through us. His light shines outward when we provide the transparent medium that allows “His divine nature to be perceived.” John 8:12 “Then spoke Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
And there is the beauty. Through Christ, God becomes one with humankind, not separate but one, working towards a “new earth,” full of joy and peace.