As an architectural student at Yale, Maya Lin traveled with a small group of other students to Washington, D.C., to get a firsthand look at the proposed site for a national monument dedicated to the Vietnam War. They were students in a senior seminar on funereal architecture focused on how people express their deepest feelings about death and sacrifice through a built form.
Lin stood in a grove of trees alongside the quiet waters of the reflecting pool and the cacophony of sounds coming from nearby Constitution Avenue. She had the impulse to take a knife to cut into the earth, “opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal,” she said. “The grass would grow back, leaving a pure, flat surface in the earth with a polished, mirrored surface, much like the surface on a geode when you cut it and polish the edge.”
Wanting only to get a good grade in her class and not intending to be among the finalists, her submission to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Committee was surprisingly selected out of thousands of entries. Maya Lin has since developed other significant memorial sites.
Boundaries’ by Maya Lin
Her book Boundaries is about space and meaning. It’s about those symbols that help us express our deepest feelings on a matter. It’s about the creative, artistic impulse that helps the rest of us saturate our thoughts with the depth of a matter, plunging us into meaning at the core of our being.
The metaphors for building are useful to those who understand that the kingdom of God is our deeper work in the world. We labor in the church so the love of God can be tangibly shared in a world where people hunger and thirst for meaning. It is in our faith that we understand who we are and that it is God’s love that helps us live as whole persons, healed from our soul sickness in a sin-scarred world.
Often, we live two-dimensional lives surrounded by empty symbols and meaningless metaphors.
One critic claims we live our Christian faith as if we are practical agnostics. In that essential denial of faith, we murmur the words but do not ponder their meaning.
We do not honor the sanctity of holy things. We sleepwalk through our daily activities and do not pause to let meaning penetrate beyond the surface defenses that keep us from God.
The challenge of Christian belief is to open up so that meaning can penetrate every pore of our being. It is to recognize that we are literally surrounded by the signs of God’s holy presence and are immersed in a world where the hidden meanings of life are signs of God’s assurance that all of life is “good.”
Whether we gather for worship or gather for a meal, whether we collect canned goods for the hungry, or call upon someone who is lonely, we are acting out the symbols of Christian belief. All those activities are visible signs that the kingdom of God is within us.
When we recognize the signs of that kingdom within us, and around us, we become worshiping, believing Christians, and the power of the holy is strong in our souls. The conversion of symbols and metaphors to spiritual realities is the work of God.
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Aauthor of Living a Narrative Life, Exploring the Power of Stories (Smyth & Helwys, 2019).