Under Construction
Rev. David Takahashi Morris
January 21, 2007
When we moved into our new house last spring, people usually took in stride the fact that we’d decided to downsize significantly because we’d tell them about it in the context of wanting to be closer to church, to be in a particular school district, and so on. What got the really big reaction, though, was telling people that we were going from three full bathrooms to one. “THREE adults and ONE child and only ONE bathroom??!!?” they’d say.
Well, we weren’t really planning to live with it that way. We thought we’d get a second bath added on to the former attic space a previous owner had remodeled into a nice loft-like master bedroom, and we were planning to get the biggest part of the work done before we moved in April 1st.
We took our first showers in that new bathroom two weeks ago.
Now, we weren’t really suffering. Although a man of a certain age NOTICES when he has to sleep with a flight of stairs between him and the bathroom, people live with much worse. I am very much aware that we are marked as a family of privilege by owning a house, by living someplace that has ANY bathrooms, by having real choices about where we’re going to live at all. We don’t have outlaw raiders or insurgent militias or global superpowers burning our house down, or shooting it up, or dropping smart bombs on it.
So I’m not complaining. Still, it was quite a process, adding on that little 8X6-foot upstairs bathroom. I learned something from it. And I think those lessons might have something to teach about anything we decide to put under construction.
Something always needs remodeling—whether it’s our house, our day-to-day life and relationships, our church community, our society, or our world.
It always starts with an idea, a vision. Ours was simple enough—just extend a floor out over a downstairs bedroom that was only one story high, pop up the ceiling above it, and there you have it! We might be envisioning that tranquil room where we can keep our books, or a kitchen where loving people will gather and laugh and nurture each other. We might envision a classroom area in our church that’s accessible to all our children. We might imagine a community where everyone is working together for one common purpose, or a world without war, or a society which truly values the lives of all its members. Visions always look simpler and more possible when our own point of view is the only one we have to consider
But if anything’s going to actually happen, we have to get other people involved. We couldn’t even draw up a plan for our little room without lining up a contractor. In a perfect world, this would be a nice deliberate process, in which we carefully lined up people we knew we could trust to collaborate with. For me the process was a less elegant and thorough. I asked our potential partners a series of questions, but only two really counted: How soon can you start? How fast can you get it done? We liked the person we wound up working with, and he did great work—but he got chosen because he gave the best answers to those questions.
The process
of finding collaborators for any work is driven to some extent by instinct and
happenstance. PACEM is a great example
of this. The first year we hosted the
men’s shelter in partnership with
Journalist
Tracy Kidder wrote a book called House
a few years back. It’s a nonfiction
account of the construction of a large private home outside
One of the builders I talked with told me about eagerly anticipating the scheduled arrival of a subcontractor who called and said it was going to be a couple days later before he could get there because, after all, “hunting season started today.” People surprise us. You may be trying to build a new committee at church to do important work, when a key partner suddenly decides they want to be part of another church. As one of our builders put it, “What’s important to them isn’t on MY agenda.”
But if the
work we’re doing matters, we need to make space on our agendas for what’s
important to our partners in the work. A
few months ago the clergy caucus of IMPACT, the new interfaith,
congregationally-based community organizing effort we’re part of, reached out
to some African-American ministers who had so far chosen not to
participate. We found that the history
of racial hurt in this city is so deep that no alliance can be formed without
first putting an honest conversation about that hurt on the table. I’m glad to say that conversation is going to
begin happening very soon—something I don’t think has ever happened among
churches in
Of course, it’s not always about what’s important to them. Sometimes unanticipated events can make us the unreliable partner in a collaborative effort. In our case this summer, we came to the end of the money we’d budgeted before our project was done, and we had to pull the plug, leaving several people who thought they were going to do some finish work scrambling to replace our job. What was important to us hadn’t been on their agenda. And in August, with church about to start up again, our work was at a standstill.
Our carpenters had run into a structural problem with our house that they had to solve before they could go forward. Before they could cut out the part of the roof we were raising to make space for the new room, they discovered, one of them would have to go down into our crawlspace, mix and set a concrete footing, and install a brace under a corner of that bedroom floor, which would strengthen the bedroom wall enough so that it could bear the weight of the roof that was left, so the whole thing didn’t fall into our back yard. That, along with a couple other structural discoveries, took a lot of carpenter time—the most expensive kind—to fix.
There was no way to predict this; as one of our builders says, you never know what you’re going to find until you start taking things apart. But once you reveal the structures and systems that hold everything together, you need to understand how to work with them if you want to make the change you seek stable and long-lasting.
When the District Anti-Racism team was formed, one of our first training sessions was about institutions. Institutions change slowly. This, we were told, is what’s good about them. I had trouble with this! But if institutions exist to preserve and protect and transmit values to the next generations, then of course they have to be resistant to change. The key, we learned, is to have a deep understanding of the structures and systems that make our institutions work; then, like skilled builders, to find which pieces have to be shifted or replaced to change the shape of the whole.
It’s also important to know what not to change. One of the builders I talked with, who specializes in renovating older houses, talked about finding a fireplace or staircase or other large element that is central to the character of the house, and then shaping the rest of the house—even if it’s almost entirely replaced with new materials—to be coherent with that central, organizing element. If you sacrifice that central element, he said, you risk losing the meaning of the whole project. This is a lesson that would be well learned by those who seem to believe they can protect the security of our country by risking the sacrifice of its fundamental values.
When
there’s trouble on a piece of construction work, unexpected allies will often turn
up, people who come and lend a hand when we desperately need it, or who offer
the right idea or aid to break up some logjam that has us paralyzed. When I realized that I was going to have to do
all the finish work in our new little bathroom, I was completely stymied. Just the sheetrock would take me weeks, I
thought. I couldn’t get started. And then I talked with my friend Tim from
Well, not really, but it can feel like that when an unexpected ally turns up at just the right moment. And it seems to happen a lot: A workplace colleague shares an encouraging word when we’re feeling low; a workshop participant brings a gentle touch to a tense moment; a community, like our new friends from the Islamic Center, decides they want to work with us when it seems like no one else will. Sometimes an ally can look so unexpected that we have to push ourselves to trust or accept them. Liberal environmental activists are finding surprising allies among conservative evangelicals who are arguing for environmental sustainability from a Biblical standpoint. Humankind is commanded to care for the earth as stewards, they say, not destroy it. One of our builders talked about a dear colleague who died, a man without much formal education who’d been hired as a painter, but turned out to be a great source of knowledge and skill in other areas. You can never know where allies are going to come from.
Even an observant friend who drops in every now and then and notices that we’re making progress can be an extraordinary gift when we’re feeling stalled because all we can think about is the tile that still needs to be set or the painting we haven’t done, or the law we haven’t changed or the barrier to equality we haven’t torn down yet.
Learning to accept that progress doesn’t always look like what we’re expecting is another lesson of construction for me. There’s a tile on a corner of our new bathtub that I had to grind and cut by hand to the right shape to match all the pieces it touches. It will always look a little odd. But the job is done—well, except for the trim I still have to get and install, maybe sometime this winter. And the sheetrock screw I somehow left uncovered on the ceiling. And that little pinhole in the grout I’m going to caulk over. And the light fixtures we still want to get. But it’s close enough for now.
One writer on design speaks of the “gulf of execution,” the gap between what we imagine and what we have the skills and resources to accomplish. There’s always something left undone. Sharon Welch writes that especially for middle-class white people, the hardest lessons to learn about justice work is that we are successful if our children will start working on the same issue from a place a bit farther along than where we started. We’re used to thinking of success as completion of a task. We need to learn what’s close enough for now, or our work will be joyless and disappointing, and we will lack endurance. All the builders I talked to acknowledged that our vision for a completed project will necessarily evolve as the work goes on. As one said, “Looking at the whole job is overwhelming. Once you have a plan, just do what’s in front of you right now.” Our results in the end won’t look just like the plan, he says, but they will be beautiful.
There’s one more construction truth for me. When I’m doing the work myself, I’m inclined to think about it a lot. I need a lot of time to gather all my tools, figure out all the materials, get everything organized, and visualize, and rearrange the materials, and make sure I’ve got all the tools. When you’re changing something substantial, the process of planning and imagining what all the effects of the change will be is seductive. It can distract you from the fact that you have to do something.
But at some point we have to pound the first nail, or mix the grout, or mail that letter to the editor, or ring that doorbell, or walk into that legislator’s office. Take your well-disciplined strengths and set them between two opposing poles, Rilke says. And then you’re committed.
Another German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says:
“Until one
is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always
ineffectiveness. . . . the moment one definitely commits oneself, then
Whatever the project we each see as ours to take part in, let us find our vision, choose our collaborators, acknowledge that our visions will evolve, identify the work of this moment—and commit ourselves in action.
“Whatever you can do,” Goethe goes on, “or dream you can, begin it.”
What do you have under construction? Let’s build it together.