Breaking News: All Lanes Blocked!

So we had a really big storm last night. Though I have one (or maybe even two) of those fancy weather radios that sound an alarm when there is a NWS alert in my county, they are not necessary. As soon as a threat of a storm approaches, Lucy the Faithful (8 year old lab) head-butts the bedroom door open and crashes down next to the bed in order to be close to Dad. She is terrified of thunder.

Within seconds of Lucy's entrance, the county sirens started going off. Those things are really loud, but I suppose they are supposed to be loud. Krys & I flipped on the TV radar and saw what looked like 24 circles of rotation headed our way, so we immediately woke Miriam up and headed to the cellar. This was sadly where we had to leave Lucy behind, because neither she nor her tall greyhound brother Murphy do stairs. As I recall now, Murphy never budged during the storm...

In the cellar, which is a place in our house where Mimi has never in her 7 months of living in this house even visited, we tried to make her think this was all some kind of fun game we'd come up with at 3:45am on a Tuesday morning. The wind was at this point unbelieveable - the weather folks on the radio mentioned 70 mph speeds. Things were crashing outside, glass was breaking and we couldn't see out the front door because the water was blowing straight under the porch and into the glass door (looked kind of like going through the carwash when in soak cycle).

But five minutes later it was all over and the rain began to die down. We came back upstairs and I peaked out the front door and saw one of the huge old oaks across the street had fallen and completely blocked the street. Within a couple of minutes a truck driving up the street slid to a stop but not in time to miss the tree. The driver was fine but it did some serious damage to his truck.

So this morning, all traffic on 6th was shut down. I've joked about traffic situations on the city street grid before. All lanes blocked! Guess I'll just jump over one street and go around it. The way our city has grown over the past 25 years, so much of the traffic circulation is limited to one major and maybe one minor route. For example, if you live to the southeast, US 280 is your primary option. If it is blocked, then you can take alternate route Caldwell Mill Road ONLY if you can get out of traffic and wind 5 miles to the west to find it. Otherwise you are completely stuck. The lessons of the 100-year old grid system were lost on the modern planners...

So this morning it happened - my street was Completely Blocked. There was even a police car out there with flashing lights! But since there were power lines lying all around my car, I walked to work. And I still beat all of the people stuck in traffic on US 280.

Dr's Martin & Martyn

I'm working today but still remembering MLK day.

The life to which Christ calls us simply doesn't fit our frameworks for Republican or Democrat - it is definately something "other". When I catch a glimpse of this - as Sarah Vowell pointed to so well in Dr. King's teaching on radically loving our enemies - it resonates deep within me how this is the way things ought to be: radical love - radical generosity - even radical hope.
Conservatives who grab the Bible as justification for economic hyperindividualism should remember what Jesus said to the rich ("sell all that you have and give the money to the poor" and "where your treasure is there will your heart be also"). And Liberals who cling to the Bible's teaching of justice and mercy yet say "hands off" to issues of personal morality also seem to stumble over the text ("...if you lust after a woman you've already committed adultry in your heart").


The Bible is often used to beat people over the head or as a weapon to give folks advantage (religious leaders in Jesus' day were pros at this). But if we really read it (as I too seldom do) maybe we would start loving each other more than we love ourselves. Seems like that would fix a lot of the problems our politicians claim to have the Big Solutions for.

But this leads back to a question for me. Do I live like I believe this stuff? Do I enter into this radical way of living, or do I just become cynical and start spewing venom when I see someone else not living right. Presbyterians have the corner market on "being right" theologically (or thinking we've got it right) but do we live it? I remember a black pastor coming to our church about 6 years ago and telling us proud, white presbyterians to get our noses out of our D. Martyn-Lloyd Jones books and get out in the world and start living the gospel we are "studying." Ironically Jones' teaching on the Sermon on the Mount had greatly changed my thinking, but do I live like it did?

What that pastor said to us that afternoon still nails me today... I haven't really changed very much.

There's no such thing as a Free Lunch (unless you like Corn)

I've been reading a lot about food lately.

I like to eat and like to think about what I'll eat next. But anyone who has known me for a while would know that my eating habits have changed a lot over the past 3 years. There are two reasons - the first is Krys. Long gone are the days where my diet included three food groups (pizza, hamburgers, taco bell) to the exclusion of vegetables. She can put some amazing meals on our table and she has caused me to think more about healthy eating.

But then this summer I read an article in the New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan that completely opened my eyes about what we are really eating, and even more frighteningly where it comes from. Then I picked up his book "The Omnivore's Dilema" and learned not only about the horrible way Industrialized Food fills our tables with factory-grown livestock and corn-infused everything, but also about wonderfully redeeming ways we can grow food in a way that is healthy for our bodies and our land/community. Go read this book! This book introduces us to a guy in the Shenandoah Valley named Joel Salatin who has to have the most sustainable farm in North America. His philosophy is so consistent that he refuses to ship his meat because he doesn't want to burn the fuel of transportation and he wants to see his local agricultural economy thrive in it's place.

Pollan continues to research and write about food/agriculture - including this scary article in NYT Magazine from a couple of weeks ago. Our attempts to get More Food Quickly, we are finding, has some pretty awful consequences. The more I read about this the more frustrating it gets, though the public is beginning to wake up and smell the antibiotic-laced bacon cooking on the stove. When Congress debated the Farm Bill before Christmas there were suddenly new voices trying to be heard over those of ADM, General Mills & ConAgra: ordinary folks who eat food are starting to get very concerned about what they consume - and they are demanding change...

This whole issue is part of the reason Krys and I want to grow much of our own food at home. Not only is it fun to plant something and then 4 months later feed yourself with it, but the garden's fresh food is healthier (and it teaches us about patience!). And maybe our daughter will grow up actually knowing where food comes from (you mean it doesn't come from McDonald's and Publix?). And we've decided that it is worth it to pay more for food grown well than for food grown purely for profit. Sure, cheap food's first cost may be lower (cheap = cheap, right?), but the cost to our health, to the need to transport over long distances, and removal of nutrients from our soil, and the nitrogen polluting our rivers and even the Gulf of Mexico make it very, very costly. And as W Berry puts it so well, the solutions are not simplistic:

"These bogus attempts at simplification ignore or despise the real complexity of the world. And ignoring complexity make complication -- in other words, a mess... people either think they'll die before the bill comes due or somebody else will pay it. But the world is complex, and if we are to make fit responses to the world, then our thinking, not our equipment but our thoughts -- will have to be complex also."

They may be beautiful responses though -- the more complex & rigorous solutions always are. Your lunch is not free. So swallow the red pill and read Pollan's articles.

I am guilty

I read this the other day, and it hits directly on the regional thinking I've been doing about architecture, and on designing for this place and this time. I'm certainly guilty of this fakery in the past and am repenting by building things that are truthful. Here's the quote:

"Let us be clear about this, the forms that people used in other civilizations or in other periods of our own country's history were intimately part of the whole structure of their life. There is no method of reproducing these forms or bringing them back to life; it is a piece of rank materialism to attempt to duplicate some earlier form, because of its delight for the eye, without realizing how empty a form is without the life that once supported it. There is no such thing as a Modern Colonial house any more than there is such a thing as a Modern Tudor house. If one seeks to reproduce such a building in our own day, every mark on it will betray the fact that it is a fake, and the harder the architect works to conceal that fact, the more patent the fact will be...

"The great lesson of history - and this applies to all the arts - is that the past cannont be recaptured except in spirit. We cannont live another person's life; we cannot, except in the spirit of a costume ball...

"Our task is not to imitate the past, but to understand it, so that we may face the opportunity of our own day and deal with them in an equally creative spirit."

- The South in Architecture, The Dancy Lectures, Alabama College, 1941, by Lewis Mumford (emphasis mine).

So when the church seeks to build - how does it jive with our view of the world - of creativity - of creation itself - to copy and cut and paste designs into the year 2008 and into this place called Alabama?

It still makes me laugh when I see real estate yard signs pointing up some Homewood, Alabama street stating, not "3 Brm" or "Pool" but "Tudor"! Is this the UK and I just didn't know it? Did we lose that war?

Seriously - we need to know and love our place. Within the framework of place there is so much freedom - to consider this climate - these local materials - this local community's memory of how to build - to then construct things that fit into this soil as seemlessly as an oakleaf hydrangia or a southern longleaf pine.

I have a lot to learn.

Architects must have supernatural powers

It is very, very rare that you see anything written about the architecture of churches. And of those rare instances, the writer will refer to the actual buildings as churches. So they're off track from the get-go.

There was an article written last month in the Associated Baptist Press that re-kindled my desire to write about this subject.

To start with, I agree with a lot of what they are saying - so much is being written and discussed about the trend for what's called the "emerging church" and how it is leaning back towards more traditional elements (liturgy, art, music, aesthetics etc) as young people want to feel more connected to the last 2000 years of Christianity. It goes to that whole idea of rootlessness that is so prevalent. I love the idea (mentioned in the article) that regionalism begins to inform the form of the architecture - where it can be more about the place and immediate culture of the people who worship there - rather than a copy of something else, or try to look like it could be anywhere.

Interesting how the article talks about American church architecture trying to be opposite of European - I hadn't considered that before. There's this demand from younger (20/30 yr olds) for something real & for there to be solid reasons for why we do what we do, and to be part of smaller congregations. That seems to be a trend (even see it in "starbuck's" culture - this longing for community). Lots of young pastors are reading "The Younger Evangelicals" by Bob Weber and other books trying to understand/categorize/disect the emerging church and if there is a shift from modern evangelicalism of the mid-late 20th century then we will probably early in the conversation. I'm not sure we'll ever see a full swing back to the kind of symbolism you see in European churches, but definitely a desire for everything we do to have a reason/purpose/deeper meaning. That allows the building to communicate more consistently.

I disagree strongly with these statements though: "It's God's calling card -- it's all he has," said Texas architect Tim Blonkvist. "People are going to make an evaluation based on what they can see before they hear anything." Where does that idea come from?!?! Scripture says "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing the word of God." The new testament only mentions buildings 2 or three times, and in all cases is talking about spiritual buildings made up of people themselves. This guy is putting words in God's mouth to say that buildings are such an essential way that God communicates - that idea doesn't come from scripture at all. Not to say that buildings shouldn't agree with what the church is saying, but this guy is going a lot farther than that. And un-churched post moderns (people 30 & younger) are less and less likely to just try out a church on a drive by - they are more likely to go if someone invites them (see next comment)...

And with this: "Whether they speak with bold clarity or subdued elegance, church buildings are often the most prominent and persistent gospel message their non-Christian neighbors encounter." That makes me very nervous... we're finding more and more (B'ham, Seattle, New York, Greenville SC) that non-Christians really pay attention to how their Christian friends/neighbors treat them. If they don't feel that Christians love & care for them for being just who they are - rather than as prospective targets for evangelization - they they will never give Christians the time of day. They hear the gospel in that way loud and clear. I'm not sure how a building can preach a gospel message. In fact I think it's impossible that a building could alone communicate the gospel. It can be inviting for sure, but that is limited.

How great would it be if regionalism and green/stewardship ideas could inform the way we design buildings for churches. I would bet our clients will be slow in moving towards this trend (as compared to other parts of the country), but it would be great if they would start to recognize it! Regionalism is definitely biblical - you see throughout Acts how Paul planted churches all around the Mediterranean, and how he would adjust based on the culture of the place. Finding a "regionalism" for Alabama would be difficult though... we've been dropping far-away styles like "tudor", "french country", and "georgian" into the Birmingham landscape for so long that you have to look really hard to see anything that really has grown out of this place. A local/regional architecture would definately have to speak to the values of the people here somehow (that could be interesting).

We'll see if anything begins to shift...

first post

Things take a long time. Things move slowly. Conversations begin and trail off, then pick up again. We plant seeds in the ground and then 4,6, 8 months later we enjoy the fruit of the plant. We are in process, a slow one. Change creeps. At times it feels like we're not moving at all. I wonder about what Jayber Crow recollected that the seemingly zig-zag path of progress we make is more like a very straight line when viewed from near the end of one's life. Will I see it that way when I'm 75 years old?

Now, I'm going to use this blog to work out some stuff with myself. It will deal with among other things:

architecture
the church (capital C and lower case c)
how those previous two things relate and don't relate
family & friends
the city, community & place
frustration
hope
things I'm reading about and learning about
music
growing things (in the ground)
weeding (the garden and my soul, as Krys refers to it)

So we'll see where this thing goes.