Square

One of our tasks at Santa Maria Virgen today was making square grids that will serve as footings for extra-weight-bearing bits of the foundation structure. It seemed very straightforward when the Honduran construction boss showed us how to do it: take four pieces of rebar, lay them in a square, tie the ends together, lay three more pieces within the square to make a ladder, flip the whole thing over and lay in three more pieces to make a 5x5 grid, tie all the intersections together with wire twists. Simple as you please.

Except that, when we began to do it, it didn't seem so simple at all. The pieces didn't want to stay where we put them. Lifting the bars up from the ground ever so slightly to pass the wire twist around the pieces had a tendency to displace the other pieces. Twisting the wire, which we'd done with such skill and finesse on the rebar cages before, seemed to follow a different geometry altogether on the grids. I never did figure out what I was doing wrong; I just know that more often than not I'd twist a nice figure-8 and the second piece of rebar wouldn't be connected to it at all. Mystifying. When the one I'd been working on with Lee Beam and Margaret Pearson and Lee Nancarrow was finally finished, I stood it up -- and it wasn't square. It wasn't all that far off square, no. But it was definitely a parallelogram, not a real right-angle square. How was that going to serve as a proper footing?

Not to worry, said Lee B. A few taps of a hammer in a few well-chosen places, a bit of push applied in a corner, and the whole grid shifted into a much more passable square. It may not have been a Pythagorean ideal form, but it would certainly do the job of helping to hold up the church.

Thinking of that, I noticed how many things we did today that required a little tapping, a bit of a push, some just-after-the-fact adjustment to line up properly for the job they were intended to do. We needed to pour concrete for another course of foundation; and to do that we needed to set up boards as concrete forms; and to hold the boards in place we created struts of masonry blocks piled on each other, angled against the boards, backed up with more blocks, pushed up together in whatever way would provide the most leverage for the board. It wasn't precision work. But the boards held, and the concrete stayed where it was put, and the foundation course looked pretty straight. There were rebar towers already set in concrete at the bases of several footings all the way around the structure; and while the bases of the towers were secure, the tops weren't always straight. As the new foundation course went in, the towers were propped into straighter line with sticks and struts and whatever could bring them into line before the next courses of blocks could grow around them. Wooden planks made up the majority of the concrete forms; but they had open ends, and the concrete had to be prevented from flowing out the ends; so Todd Doorenbos and Lee N and I stuffed wet heavy paper -- concrete bags, actually, that had been dunked in a pail of water -- into the places where the flowing concrete had to be dammed. It looked mighty strange. But when the concrete was poured into the forms the paper held, and it left just the open spaces needed to set in extra rebar cages and footing grids when the foundation reinforcements are built.

A lot of the things we did today required a little tapping, a little push, some propping up, some stuffing in, some little bit of adjustment before they came into line, before they were square enough to do the jobs they were meant to do.

In Christian theology we talk about "justification," and the best simple explanation of justification that I've ever heard related it to the practice of "justifying" a paragraph of text. A "justified" text has a straight margin on both the right and the left, both the beginning and end of each line. The lines line up in a satisfying square. In order to achieve the even margin on the right-hand side, the typesetter (or, now, the word processing program) has to add tiny bits of space between words, even between individual characters. In the days of movable type, the printer had to tap on the type, push a little here, pull a little there, in order to add the extra spaces to make the lines line up. But when all the work was done, the paragraph was justified, the characters were squared off in right relationship.

I think perhaps that's how God does the work of justification in us: a tap here, a push there, a bit of insight, an eye-opening experience, a forgiveness offered, a love deepened: bit by bit, God adjusts us in small ways to come into righter relationships, to line up our energies and actions and thoughts and feelings in something more like the way God really wants us to be. Like the grid for the footing, we are not squared up true all at once, but it takes some time and effort to bring our potentials into realization of God's best will for us.

But, unlike the footing grid, we have the capacity to work along with God, to co-operate in the adjustments that make us more true, to be part of the work of making our own souls. Not self-justification, but cooperating with God in the work of our mutual justification, our mutual adjustment and accommodation, for the righting of our many relationships.

A tap here, a push there, with humility and with good will -- that's how we become squared up true in God's love.