The emergence of sequences that consecrate our sacred human life
The physical world and its places and its buildings reveal more poignantly, more accurately than almost anything else, what is really happening in human life. The form of the world — the form of the buildings — tells more poignantly than anything does, what will be happening there, what life will be like. And the making of a living world — that process is not only more revealing, it is more potent, closer to the bone, closer than anything else to our frailty and our reality, the nature of our society.
When we build a world for ourselves, we are not only building a world which is convenient, where we can be comfortable, where we can — as far as possible — be alive ourselves. We are also actively building a picture of our own sacred life, ordinary, dumb as it sometimes is, even — but a picture of the life which truly lies within us.
In a healthy world, each one of us must, in some degree, participate in this work, and allow our individual thoughts and desires to shape, at least a part of our small world. The world, what we call the world, is our work of sacrifice, our adoration, that we make this thing, this container, this world, which then makes us, and allows us to live.
But to create this thing, obviously we have to be — during the process — in touch with what we are.
If we are to imagine a process which can allow all of us in society to create our communal life together, then this process must — to an extraordinary extent — allow these ordinary feelings, our ordinary thoughts and passions, to enter the world and therefore to enter the processes by which the world is made. No bureaucrat can handle this for us.
For all that to be contained, captured, brought to life, it must be us, mustn’t it — we ourselves — who do the deciding and at least some of the building, so that it is ours when it is finished, and we can still feel what it means to be alive in that thing, built, unfinished, but nevertheless open to our ordinary stories and our ordinary human life.
Well, now we can see why a refined and politely wooled-out process will not do, why something conceived in the planning department, or in the professional pages of legislation, or in a professional code of ethics, will not sufficiently catch the glint of that something that engages us, here, in our life on Earth.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/20 The spread of living processes throughout society#