The New Jerusalem

 When Ivan Karamazov says, "If there is no immortality, then everything is lawful," he means it to be shocking. The point is that without eternal punishment, there's really nothing to stop us from murdering people if we feel like it. But he forgets to listen to what he himself is saying, because the whole proposition depends on the word "if." His unspoken premise, of course, is that there is indeed no immortality--but, luckily, he only thinks that because he's being a stupid-face.

 

There's really no point in doing anything if it's not eternal. But here's the beautiful thing: if anything truly is eternal, then that means everything is eternal. Either nothing matters, or absolutely everything does. I've talked before about the care and craft that God, the Master Builder, puts into every molecule of this world. We in turn put care and craft into every detail of our daily lives, even if we often do it automatically, by sheer force of habit. (Force of habit's not always bad, after all.) When we throw on our clothes and go to work in the morning, we're building something.

The great medieval cathedral builders used to place a tiny gift at the top of the tallest steeple when construction was finished, a little present just for God. (That's also why we put on our best clothes for church: wrapping ourselves as presents for Jesus.) In Tomie de Paola's Legend of the Poinsettia, the heroine learns that every gift is beautiful because it is given, and the weeds she offers to Baby Jesus turn into magnificent flowers. Every weed, every pebble, that we offer to God is becoming a piece of a cathdral, a flowering city that we're building together. That may sound a bit trite, but that's because it's an image of truth, a furtive memory we all have in the back of our minds. The Plans of the Architect, which we glimpsed before we were born.

 

When we look back at our lives from the summit, we'll see we've been dragging ziggurats up massive slopes. Every hardship, a buckle in the harness. We spend our lives maneuvering titanic chunks of masonry--but unlike Sisyphus, our toil is not in vain. When we throw on our clothes and go to work in the morning, we're chiseling filigree into some nook of the Great Cathedral. Wasted work? There's no such thing. God loves it. And in the New Jerusalem, our friends will have an eternity to stumble across the little details that we ourselves have forgotten about and say, "Oh hey, that's cool." Our work, our work, our daily bread: we're building the New Jerusalem.

Chickens and Chain Mail

For many fans of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the “making of” featurettes are almost as fun as the films themselves. In the extended documentary of The Two Towers, we get to see a great deal about how New Line Cinema created the Fighting Uruk-Hai, the goblin horde that assails our heroes at Helm’s Deep. One of the things that strikes many people as nearly insane is the level of detail that went into their clothing and, in particular, their armor. For every single one of the hundreds of extras who worked on these movies, entire shirts of real, functioning chain mail were hand-forged: shirts that could not even be seen in the films because they were usually covered with cloaks!

Why put in so much “needless” work? Well, bear with me. My beautiful bride has a long-time love affair with ducks and chickens which I have always found endearing, though slightly baffling, and a few months ago, we finally decided to start keeping a few chickens of our own. In the process of learning about how to tend them, we have watched various documentaries, including one called The Natural History of the Chicken.

This film reveals profound depths in the physical and (yes, I know how it sounds) psychological underpinnings of the chicken. I know, love, and respect these creatures far better now, despite the fact that I still feel as though God had an uproarious time inventing them. It’s just a silly little bird. Why put so much care and craft into every feather? No one’s going to notice. Most of the feathers can’t even be seen!

Well, now you see where I’m going with this. You may not see every ring of the Orcish armor, nor every feather of the chicken’s plume. But we can feel the love, the absolute love, that went into every molecule of these things. Why put in so much needless work? Because it’s needless! Because love gives itself in superabundance. Because chain mail is cool and chickens are fun and God is so in love with us it’s insane!

Armor and Waycloak

One of the many, many bits of wisdom the Church has accumulated through the centuries is the use of small bodily gestures by the faithful. People laugh, I think, because we do these things--genuflecting, dipping our fingers in the holy water, and so forth--without thinking about them, but to do them without thought is exactly the point. We don't think about breathing either, unless something's off-kilter. When we're upset or scared, then we have to focus: breathe in--breathe out. It's no accident that Ki, the word that Westerners use to mean life-force or energy, really means breath: just as it's no accident that pneuma, wind, also means the Holy Spirit.

My dad likes to tell a story about a lady he knew when he was a boy, who taught him to let a few droplets of water fall from his fingers when he blessed himself at the holy water font in the vestibule. Why? As a little offering for the thirsty souls in Purgatory. The punchline of the story is that he met her again, many years later as an adult, and told her he had always remembered her teaching him that--and it turned out she herself had forgotten it in the interim! He was given the gift of being able to teach it back to her.

 

My wife taught me something when we were dating: when you make the Sign of the Cross, don't just flick your fingers around. What you are doing is donning the Armor of Righteousness and the Waycloak of the Pilgrim Church, so cover your torso with bold movements. Yes, it ought to be reflexive (unless something is off-kilter!), but reflexive doesn't mean unintelligent. Drawing your sword in the face of a dragon is reflexive.

 

Eternity is always happening now, in the small bodily moments. That's the whole point of us, of souls in dust--it's why we're neither beasts nor angels. It only makes sense to train your body to worship the Lord of Hosts, just as we do with our minds and hearts and souls. So when you make the Sign of the Cross, brothers and sisters--raise it high.