PROJECT MANAGEMENT
by Forrest Church
Feb. 13, 2005
Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Gates," the vivid public artwork that at once careens through and presides over Central Park this week and next is at once festive and stately, personal and monumental. 7,500 gates outline 26 miles of pathways in a saffron display of breathtaking originality. To what purpose? Simply joy. It is a joy project, surprising us with joy. It plays with ours minds. Stone over scissors. Scissors over paper. Paper over stone. Twenty-five years in the making, 20 million dollars invested, all for an ephemeral burst of wonder. Very like our lives, when you think about it—an ephemeral burst of wonder.
The Christos' grand project evokes our own life projects in other ways as well. Imagine your own life as a series of works in progress presented daily at a craft fair. Each day's exhibits present an overlapping series of unfinished projects---the child project, the parent project, the love project, the vocation project, the justice project, even the God project. Add and subtract community projects and recreation projects, house projects and old friend reclamation projects. You might work on a project to enhance All Souls or your college or to improve your neighborhood. Less conspicuously important projects also possess meaning, like attempts to lose weight or to improve your health. Another long-term project might be to read all of Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Marcel Prousts's Rembrance of Things Past. We work on dozens of projects at once, tasks that invest our lives with meaning.
Through hard work on even a single project, we may discover meaning. At the same time, we can also create meaning. Something that otherwise couldn't have existed emerges from our effort. We don't just "have" ideas. Most ideas emerge at intersections in our lives. They occur when something we see, do, hear, or feel meets a deeper need that we then act on. It is magic when this happens. Yet we rarely do this alone. Someone gives us the lines, and we color them in. Or we give them the lines, and they add the color. It doesn't really matter. We discover and create something that did not exist before. By taste and according to circumstance, the colors differ. So do the lines. That is why meaning is not absolute. There are millions of ways to do almost anything. Yet meaning is not purely relative either. The meanings we discover and create can be judged by their impact on other people's lives.
When you make another person feel safe or loved, you create meaning. When you accomplish a difficult project, you also create meaning. Of the two—enhancing the security of others or completing an important task—neither is inherently more meaningful. This century's most brilliant scientist, Albert Einstein, didn't necessarily have a more meaningful life than anyone who can honestly claim to have married well. The same caution holds in other arenas of human accomplishment. Just before he died, after five failures, J. Paul Getty said that he would trade his entire fortune for a single happy marriage. Fortunately, for most of us the choice is not between one thing (discovering the theory of relativity, making a fortune) or another (having a happy marriage). The marriage project itself breaks down into smaller, more manageable projects. By doing a single thing to make our spouse happier and by sustaining it over time, we can change the entire dynamic of a marriage. The same holds for other relationships, in fact for any of life's ongoing challenges. If we break down problems into projects, as one of you told me once, it's usually not one big gorilla on your back (although it sometimes it feels like one). It's more likely to be a bunch of little monkeys that you can pick off one at a time.
Our spiritual search—the God project if you will—can be viewed in a similar light. Instead of positing and searching for one great truth that imbues all life with meaning, we can add up little truths one by one. This is not the usual practice in theology. On the contrary, most theologians tackle life's meaning as they might a Rubik's Cube, a puzzle containing, I am assured by good authority, over 43 quintillion variations that admits but a single solution.
For me, life is more like a interactive mosaic or stained glass window, some pieces or panes set at birth, some placed by effort, others shifting according to happenstance. We are each a pastiche of works, our lives under constant construction and development. Though recognizable from the beginning, they take shape as we grow, love, fail, and recover. They change as we develop, and as the world changes us. We comprise multiple surfaces of fixed and movable, interchangeable images that together compose and recompose our lives. On any given day, some pieces are broken, some miscolored or badly cast. Others are fixed intractably in place. At least as many move, and every move offers an opportunity for new hope and insight. Remember, in own lives there are infinitely more than 43 quintillion variations. Myriads of these present to the searching eye a window on beauty, truth, and love.
To shift the metaphor a bit, we each look out our window at the world, but through one set of panes at a time. As children, parents, spouses, bosses, employees, and friends, we are different people in differing contexts. We look upon and are viewed by our world in many ways. Even as fifty-six old adult, I am a child, and sometimes childish, when speaking to my mother. Beyond this, I am a preacher, pastor, lover, social activist, baseball fan, classical and country music aficionado, writer, father, husband—the list goes on and on. D.H. Lawrence said that each of us, as long as we remain alive, is in him- or herself a multitude of conflicting people. This rings true to me. In some contexts I am shy, even insecure, in others affable and outgoing. Even within a given context, playing a familiar role, I can be a different person according to shifting mood or backdrops that color the same setting in a brighter or more forbidding light. Since by nature and nurture we are cast in many roles and evince multiple personae, our search for an authentic self (the essence of our being) is no less vain than is our quest for ultimate meaning.
Fortunately, life is not a puzzle to be solved but a series of projects to accomplish as best we can. It is not a work in progress but a series of works in progress. It embraces living and dying, loving and losing, failing well, recovering, and coping. The light of meaning refracts through many filters, some rosy, some dark, each changing the light behind them. From this perspective, life becomes meaningless only when we look selectively through the darkest panes of our window, the panes that block the light.
For instance, if we view our lives not in terms of projects or in parts but as a whole, when we fail in a single project—our job, health, a relationship—we may view life's meaning through only one beclouded lens and quickly become despairing. We press our nose up against the darkest pane in our stain glass window and our entire lives are enveloped in darkness. As long as we think of ourselves in absolute terms as successful or unsuccessful, healthy or ill, victor or victim, saved or damned, the moment the world turns against us, as surely it will, we risk sacrificing all sense of meaning.
There is never a time when something in our lives could not, in and of itself, trigger a sense of meaninglessness or hopelessness. If we are struggling with but a single important aspect of four lives, even the sun sometimes seems cruel. When I get anxious or depressed, as I do from time to time, it is usually because I am focusing on a single part of my life that has gone awry. This puts me in blinders; I lose my peripheral vision. Even little things can throw me out of kilter. Blocking out the good, I see only the bad in myself or my situation. Sometimes I get anxious and depressed the very same day! But then another project saves me. Often it is a comfort the dying and their families project, through which the light of new meaning parted the shadows of my self-absorption. I have seen people on their deathbeds take the final note of life and turn it into a symphony. To be present at such a moment is to hear the angels sing.
It beings with a phone call, followed by a few pastoral encounters, often a crisis, sometimes a deathbed confession. Or just holding hands with another human being, mysteriously born, fated to die, who is about to find out what happens next, which neither of us knows. Here meaning is completely contextual. We throw parent and child projects and fighting for life and accepting death projects into the mix. We rise (or fall) to the occasion, with tears often a remarkable amount of laughter, almost always great regret and sadness, ideally humility, sometimes humiliation as the body falls apart, and then, good-bye.
Existential philosopher Albert Camus asked himself daily whether he should choose to continue to live. I was moved by this once; now I find it silly. For me, the question is not "Whether?" but "How?" Having witnessed courage, repentance, even family redemption, at times of greatest trial, I chafe at those who trade in absurdity. The meaning we glean from life is written not with the final period but in between the lines—in the little dash between dates on our tombstone. Meaning stems from how we meet life's exigencies, not from why things like pain and suffering exist. Pain can even be put to use. As Herman Melville said, "mishaps are like knives." They either serve us or cut us, depending on whether we grasp them by the blade or by the handle. Handling life well, whenever we surprise others and ourselves by rising to difficult occasions, we can redeem the darkest day. A stubborn man finally says he's sorry. A frightened soon-to-be widow tells her husband to let go, kisses him, and gently suggests that it is all right for him to leave her now. Meaning illuminates the darkness as well as the light.
The wise old preacher of Ecclesiastes had it right.
It is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which we toil under the sun the few days of the life we are given; for this is our lot. Likewise all to whom are given wealth and possessions, and who are able to enjoy them, and to accept their lot and find enjoyment in their toil. For they will scarcely brood over the days of their lives, because they are occupied with the joy of their hearts.
Enjoy life with those whom you love, all the days of your life that are
given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your
toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do
with your might.The message is not to life for the day. You may wake up on the morrow with a hangover. Carpe diem is to live in the day. Be nostalgic for the present. Look forward to the present. Don't assume that you have to have everything right with the past before you dare to seize this moment for all it has to offer. Don't focus so hard on your life that your focus blurs and the images double, twice the problems, twice the troubles, and it has to make sense and you just can't make it, so you press your nose up tighter against the glass. Stand back. Take a deep breath. Take a wider view.
That's what spiritual growth is about. Not getting it right, but changing the lens, rotating projects, picking out a new piece for your mosaic, walking through a saffron gate.
Why not begin afresh this afternoon. Make today's project a walk in the park. Put yourself in the big picture. Look out, not in. Look up. A burst of color. A miracle. The miracle is life. Your very own.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.