meanderings

I have this one memory of me as a ten year old boy analyzing the cornerstone of our church and thinking how absolutely perfect that corner was. I believed that there were good and competent adults in complete control of all aspects of the world, and this cornerstone, exemplified this. I thought all streets were perfectly built, with a precision that I assumed was total. The imagination of a child found the imposed structure not divinity, but rather the most common human aspect; these builders and deciders I never imagined as a physical presence, but rather simply as faceless humanity, committed to perfection, expressed as symmetry. This is not a story to get somewhere else. This was the closest I ever got to faith.

To me there is still nothing more beautiful than symmetry, but now I don’t look for it in corners and pillars and marvels of engineering. Rather, with the inevitable loss of faith I found consolation in the purely formless. Now it feels to me that in the abstract the impossibility of perfect symmetry is acknowledged and consecrated, made the holy of holies. Because God cannot be imagined or attained, we pray through a man, we worship a stone.