When we were designing our new church building, I wanted for us to come up with symbols that would represent the new understanding of Christianity for which we are seeking.
The stained glass window on our church’s steeple is a small wooden cross surrounded by a large colorful pattern known as a “mandala.” The cross is intended to represent our particular history, culture and vocabulary as Christians, and the mandala represents the insight that we are but one element in a beautiful pattern that should include us all.
The cross within a mandala is symbol that contextualizes our church within the common life of all. While our community is organized within a specific denomination, we realize we are called to blossom into a gift serving the whole world.
It is possible for one’s understanding of love to be selfish or sectarian, but it is also possible for one’s definition of love to be so abstract and universal that it is, for all practical purposes, inapplicable.
Unless we remember our own limited particularity, it can be a temptation to believe our group has copyrighted universality and to fight with each other over our various ideas of unity. The safest road is to recognize both our particularity AND our interconnectedness with the whole. We sing a very specific part in the song of life but we must sing in harmony with the whole.
The best statement I know of this principle of realizing our particularity within the larger unity is Diego Rivera’s description of his art: “I know now that those who hope to be universal in their art must plant in their own soil. Great art is like a tree, which grows in a particular place and has a trunk, leaves, blossoms, boughs, fruit, and roots of its own. The more native art is, the more it belongs to the entire world, because taste is rooted in nature. When art is true, it is one with nature. This is the secret of primitive art and also of the art of the masters Michelangelo, Czanne, Seurat, and Renoir. The secret of my best work is that it is Mexican.”
The cross within a mandala is a reminder that it is an accident of history whether we begin as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu or any other worldview. The important thing is to be rooted in the particularities of our own story in a way that blossoms as unique and beautiful flowers in service to the one tree of life.