Loose fit, long life

In a past life (I've had several), I had a number of friends who were professional building conservationists.

Sometimes, this was a lot of fun... I seem to have made it a feature of my life since childhood to try and get into places that I'd normally be barred from (my favourite was the school boilerhouse) so there's a certain frisson to being mates with people who have keys to all kinds of buildings that the public aren't normally allowed to visit.

Sometimes it was much less fun. There was a lot of tedious standing around, tutting at the use of the wrong paint (not just type, but also hue... and sub hue... and apparently sub sub hue), the wrong bricks (colour, shape, size, manufacture and patterning are all very important here), the wrong pointing (apparently the cementy bit between bricks and the order in which they're glued together also matters) and a lot of other 'wrongs'...

There was also a lot of arguing over just how far back to take a restoration... being a bit of a child of nature I always used to like to suggest "to the original oak forest" - this was received with derision until they realised that I was serious. I'd rather look at a forest than a stately home any day.

However, there was one phrase that used to come up from time to time, and that was 'Loose fit, long life'... It's a phrase that particularly puzzled me, because it always seemed to be applied to the most ramshackle old buildings; the ones that look like they'd been out on a particularly committed Friday night on the town and crawled home to slump in a heap in a corner of their neatly manicured garden at 3 in the morning... but it was a phrase that always seemed to meet with universal approval.

"Grand building Gromit... ay... look at them winders... them beams... never see that now... no siree... loose fit, long life..."

... and everyone would nod and chew on their cloth caps...


I left the cap-chewing behind when I moved to Bristol. But recently, a few encounters with people who have felt that there was little space for them in the more traditional Church model... and long personal ruminations on Church itself have brought me back around to wondering about the idea of 'loose fit, long life', particularly with regards to the Church...

Since that's a lot of words... here are some pictures...

Here is a house that has suffered from subsidence

 

and this is another house that has suffered from the same kind of subsidence

There are a lot of metaphors that I could draw on here... but I'm sure you can tell what I'm getting at... Where the first house's strength comes from the integrity of a rigid external structure, the second house's strength comes from a wooden frame made out of beams that are pegged together and are free to move.

So, as the earth shifts, the owner of the first house curses his solicitor and heads for temporary accommodation on a caravan site... The owner of the second, on the other hand, just slaps some plaster in the cracks, paints the patch and puts on the kettle.

Now, I was brought up in a 'Grace Baptist' Tradition... they're big on solid foundations... *sings* "The wise man built his house upon the rock" (Matthew 7:24-27)... and I've also been brought up to be big on bricks (as opposed to houses made of straw and twigs that one might huff and puff and blow down... little piggy *oink*)...

But the problem with foundations is that they're only any good if they are really real (like Jesus' teaching) rather than just appearing to be real (like teaching about Jesus teaching)... and the problem with rigid walls is that once they're up, you can't move them, or remove them, or extend them unless you start putting in rolled steel joists and wall ties and all kinds of other malarkey.

So, as I've gradually come to terms with the idea that my previously assumed foundations are perhaps more teaching about teaching, than teaching itself (more on this in a later post).... and experience has led me to wonder if church rules can sometimes be more a question of institutional life and death than reflections of a living hope (again, more on this later)... I wonder whether there isn't a good argument that actually, the best way to avoid some of the people I've met having to shell out for temporary homes on the equivalent of a spiritual trailer park,  is is to adopt a different approach...

... and deliberately build on the basis of a loose fit, long life frame.