Inverting the Energy Paradigm

Contemplating the beauty of creation is the most useful thing we can possibly do right now. It is not a substitute for useful action. It is the wellspring of useful action. When grateful awe inhabits us, we bring it to everything we do. We yearn to add to the magnificence, the aliveness, and the beauty we have unstintingly admired, and cannot bear ... See more

Devotional architecture, and the devotional mindset in general, does not reduce the world to zero in order to start again. It embraces the gift of the world as it is, and seeks to continue the process of creation. Devotion is what completes the circle of giving and receiving, feeding via human creativity the energies of nature back to their source.

The limits of supply and ecological burden are NOT asking us to use less. They ask us to use differently. (And when we use differently, we will use less.) It is the devotional use of energy that brings giving and receiving into balance.

The beauty or ugliness of a society’s religious architecture reveals its state of health or illness. As goes its religious architecture, so goes the rest of its buildings, and so goes everything it does.

So the question remains, how are we to meet our energy needs sustainably, without doing further damage to human health, the planet, and the rest of life? Actually, that is the wrong question, whose framing forecloses the possibility of an answer. The main issue is not how we obtain the energy, it is the use to which we put it.

For any being or any system to thrive, giving and receiving must be in a state of balance. The balance is not rigid or static; it is a state of dynamic equilibrium.

An artist is one who does something better than it needs to be done for any foreseeable return to herself. Thus she is in the spirit of gift.

Reciprocity means that we recirculate the beauty we take back to the world whence it came. We receive what nature gives, change its form, and pass it forward, adding to the world’s health, beauty, and aliveness.

Burnout signals that the time has come to turn one’s energy toward different ends. That doesn’t mean that the old ends were wrong. It is that the time has come for a change.