The demolition of buildings is an everyday experience it seems. In our suburb, and it seems all over the country, there is a building boom: but in so many instances what we notice first is the demolition. Homes where, over perhaps a hundred years, a family began, grew, and moved out in the wider world, to be replaced by another generation, or more—and then in a matter of minutes, all that living, sharing, learning, struggle and joy, is torn down.
[I do not wish to comment upon the demolition of a wing of a large house in Washington DC, but if I did I would say that I wish the outcry was matched by a similar concern for the homes of several million people in Gaza.]
In the famous poem in the biblical book named Eccelesiastes, chapter 3, there is a time ‘for every matter under heaven’—all of life, including ‘a time to tear down and a time to build up’.
I remember the first time I watched the demolition of a home, next door to us. Then just a few years ago we did the same, in our case out of necessity. (The house was unstable and was literally falling down internally.) Then came the re-building.
I have been reflecting upon this dynamic: a suburb or town develops over a period of time, and then the buildings gradually decay or in some way become unstable, or no longer functional. Just as there was a time to build, there comes a time to ‘tear down’. But that is only a part of the story, for there is also a time to build up again.
I’m interested in this seemingly longer-term cycle of building, decay or demolition, and building again. In an important sense, it seems to me the rhythm of all life. All too easily we think of time in exclusively linear terms, centred upon ourselves. We measure ‘history’ from some imagined starting point, or a classic date, such as the birth of Christ, or Mohammed, and we have also imagined the origins of the universe as a point ‘in time’, the paradoxical beginning of time. And we think of ourselves as a life with a specific starting point and ending.
Another way of thinking of these things, however, is to abandon the linear conception and think in terms of cycles. Buildings come and go, as the materials are formed and later lose that form and become something else. So it is with our bodies also. Eventually we return to the earth, in some way or another. And who we are, in essence, has something much more to do with the reality of the whole, life itself.
Time is a measure of only a part of this reality. The process, of ‘a time to tear down and a time to build up’ is itself the process of life, and we are all the time taking shape, forming some configuration, being and becoming. For me, the most significant word here is becoming.
There is a story in the Bible where the great leader of the Israelite refugees from Egypt, Moses, met with the mysterious presence, a voice calling to him from within a bush that burned but was not consumed: and Moses asked who this One was. The response he is given is ‘I am who I am’, or ‘I will be what I will be’.
Here then is the astonishing suggestion of a God who is continually in the process of becoming, and who invites us too to see that life, our life, is a participation in and with this becoming.
We are invited to participate in and belong to what is both beyond us and yet includes us in its becoming. As there is a time to tear down and a time to build up, so is the circle of all life, a creative community of becoming.
In this participation we may find the belonging that allows us to see beyond our linear time, our buildings and demolitions, and humbly welcome and nourish all that lies within and around.