Architecture of Freedom: Bones
The human body is full of material for contemplation. Look no further than your own structure to increase your capacity for wonder and awe! The bones, in particular, fascinate me. I find in them an image of the law of God—to be interiorized as virtue and animated by love through Christ.
We take for granted the freedom of movement we are afforded by this internal skeleton. Imagine how encumbered we would be with exoskeletons large enough to cover “beetles” six feet tall! If nothing in the design of man is “accidental” but rather is integral to our existence as bearers of the image of God, what do these bones have to teach us?
As a parent, I create an exterior law, hoping my children will internalize it as they mature. Their muscles are meant to develop and, in the process of pulling those bones every which way, to strengthen the bones, too. I’ve got to let them use those “muscles”! They must be allowed to make some choices, take some falls, have some freedom. If I keep an external cast on too long, the muscles atrophy and eventually even the bone declines in density.
The opposite scenario is no prettier. If I let a kid with a broken bone walk unsupported, greater damage—even deformity—may result. It’s dangerous to keep him locked in the “safety” of legalism, but it’s also dangerous to set him “free” with weak formation, with no moral guidelines or supervision. So, bones have helped me learn to be a better parent.
I enjoy everything I can understand about the way bones serve as little factories for blood cell production. I’m no osteo-expert, but just knowing that this is happening deep within the structure of my being reminds me that there is life-giving wisdom in the old laws given to the Israelites. The empty space supported within the matrix of bone marrow speaks to me of Sabbath rest—the leisure, the openness to the Spirit’s interior infusion that keeps the burden of bone, law, obligation from becoming too heavy to bear.
I’ve learned that the joints—so necessary for fine articulation of movement, for gracefulness—are particularly vulnerable to injury and inflammation. I approach carefully the transition points—the “joints”—of life with this in mind. I thank God for the discernments, distinctions, and definitions made possible through the interior logic, the logos, or law-word, operating within me. I perceive the slow development of doctrine in the Church as a skeletal, life-supporting process, and I don’t resent the “rigidity” of the clarity that results. I expect a continual supply of life-refreshing corpuscles to flow from within the rock-like stability that is bone, that is Church.
There is kinship between bare winter trees and my own hard, knobby, hard-working bones. They make so clear that living things are characterized as much by that which is hard, slow-changing, unyielding, and limited as by that which is flowing, daily renewed, malleable, and less distinct in form.
The skeleton is an arch—pelvis, foot—evenly distributing weight with a design I threaten to thwart if I impose my fears, my deformed mental model, my imbalanced force upon it. This leads me to the shape that architects say balances two types of force: the arch. Compression—the force that pushes down on you—is experienced as external circumstances, limitations, and demands. Tension—the discomfort of being pulled in opposite directions—is experienced as interior distress.
Weight on a bridge (or building, or body) pushes down. The underside of the bridge is in tension as the endpoints rise, pulling against one another until the plank snaps or the heavy object breaks through. End posts (or walls, or toes) push back, but greater weight can be borne if an arch directs the force directly down through them to the ground. Instead of resisting the outward push, they are evenly pushed straight down, and so the force works to maintain their position.
Tremendous weight + very thick load-bearers = support, but less open space. To open more space, open up the arch by external buttressing—direct more force into the supporting ground. I trust that the entirety of God’s law frees and supports me spiritually as a skeleton does physically, and I am learning to maintain a “posture” toward God of trust and complete reliance.
For greater grace and freedom of movement, I must learn to rely on my skeleton to support me—relaxing muscles and ligaments that otherwise try to take over the work, exacting a price in tension, then pain. Bones speak to me of posture and poise. I do not need to clench and tighten my being to stay “upright” and “in good alignment”; rather, I must trust in the law that Christ fulfills within me. My freedom, my dynamic equilibrium, radiates outward from the very marrow of my being, where He is a fountain of refreshment and renewal.
Though it sounds a bit gruesome, the practice of distributing saints’ bones appeals to my sensibilities! Some virtue of holiness seems, clearly, to reside in our physical and material relics, and bones last longer than all the rest. There is a story in Scripture of a dead man who was tossed in beside the holy prophet Elisha’s bones and was thus brought miraculously back to life (2 Kings 13:21). It makes me wonder how my behavior, my acquisition of virtue, my adherence to God’s laws might be affecting my bones, marrow, and blood.
The expansion of the interior dimension of persons is exactly what I picture when I say “spirituality,” “capacity for Christ,” “human freedom,” or “inner spaciousness.” There are opposite temptations made clearer by the contemplation of the arch. When you experience discomfort, you might tense up against it (thickening the walls, closing in on yourself, tightening in fear) or give way completely and disintegrate. Neither solution is a good one, because both ruin the balance between structure and space suggested by architectural ideals. In both cases, the interior dimension is reduced.
You need, rather, to learn to “open the arch” when interior discomfort demonstrates the need for greater accommodation of tensions and to “strengthen the supports” when exterior pressures threaten to crush you. Prayer, of course, helps in both directions. Prayer helps open and infuse you with light and grace to bear tensions. Prayer also helps strengthen resolution, virtue, and courage—structural elements that give you staying power and help force to be directed straight down into the Ground of Being, who can take anything.
I know there are things I won’t realize about myself, about the spiritual life, without understanding bones more fully! One lifetime isn’t enough to begin to plumb all these depths. Eternity will be anything but boring if the taste of wonder is any indication.
This is an excerpt from Souls at Work: An Invitation to Freedom.