For Whom Would You Build Your Best?

If you work with wood, for whom would you create your finest chair or cabinet? If you work with stone, for whom would you build the most beautiful staircase? If you are an artist, for whom would you make your greatest sculpture or painting, your most profound music, your most exquisite architecture?

Would it be some local strongman — the one with the priciest car and plenty of respect? Some oligarch, the owner of a golden toilet? A politician, assuming he doesn’t already belong to either of the previous categories? Some celebrated guru? A high-ranking clergyman?

Isn’t that a disgusting set of choices?

And if it is — is it even worth showing the best of your craft? If not, will you simply accept that you will never build anything extraordinary, because there is no one worthy to build it for? Or do you just care about getting paid? Are you rational enough to produce work as mediocre as possible, calibrated to maximize your earnings? Is it all just work for you, no passion? Do you only care about living comfortably, having given up all ambition?

For me, these questions are very real, and they would have entirely different answers if I were not Catholic. But I believe they matter to many others as well — I can even see the coping mechanisms people have developed to arrive at partially satisfying answers.

When I look at much of modern art, I often feel I am hearing the response: “I hate that giving my best makes no sense within my worldview — but at least I can fight for someone whose voice isn’t heard, who is abused or marginalized.” On its face, this is a noble motivation. But it is not the same as producing your best.

There are even less satisfying answers, like: “I’m going to shock you and stir up your emotions by exposing my take on the truth.” This is a worse motivation — and yet it still earns more respect in my eyes than being able to say that a man with a golden toilet bought your painting, which now hangs above it. It would be only slightly better if it were an Archbishop of a major metropolis who bought it and hung it in his office. I don’t think this is only my bias: it is the artists who shake us by exposing uncomfortable truths who end up in modern galleries, while those who pleased the most prominent buyers are always faintly suspected of having produced kitsch.

But earning the highest respect among critics by exposing your take on the truth is still not the same kind of activity as struggling to produce your very best. And if the world is designed in a way that fully realizing your potential makes no sense, it would be a depressing world to live in. Still, I would rather live in such a depressing world than live in self-deception — and so I understand why some people choose the depression over the illusion. I believe living in truth is the highest value, even when it brings suffering. You may find this a fundamentally Christian attitude, yet there may in fact be more people among non-believers than among believers who have chosen suffering over lies, and I have deep empathy for that. I also feel a profound sadness that the Church has so neglected the task of conveying truth in ways that are legitimate and defensible from a rational, scientific perspective, that many people today would sooner choose to suffer than believe in God.

Yet being a believer in God still doesn’t change the situation much — I think the turning point lies somewhere else entirely. Many believers would likely disagree, since once you believe in God, He may seem like the ideal recipient of your best work, as worthy a recipient as one could find. But while any believer accepts this theoretically, the real question is how to implement it practically in daily life. For a Christian, it seems simple. You can serve the poor and help the disadvantaged, the oppressed, the ill, those who are alone. You can even do all of this in secret, in which case you don’t face any disgusting choice. You can do it all for Him, since it is the relationship with Him that matters. And you can see this is what the Church has done well in many cases — whether you take her as an institution or as a community of believers who together love God. But in a sense, this answer too is only partially satisfactory. It is in fact somewhat similar to where artists turn their attention when it no longer makes sense for them to do their best. And no wonder — this is where our whole society has plateaued for the last two centuries.

I know many Christians will hate to hear it, but caring for the poor, the ill, and the marginalized is not enough for a proper relationship with God. It is a necessary part of any such relationship, but it doesn’t quite solve the puzzle. And our God is the God of incredibly intricate puzzles — many of them presented to us in the Gospels, but also in physics, and everywhere else we care to look.

First, if you are poor, ill, or marginalized, you are about as likely to be a sinner as if you were rich, healthy, and privileged. Helping others is noble on its face, but when you relieve them of material suffering only to leave them accepting that striving to live up to their full potential makes no real sense, you have merely replaced material suffering with intellectual and spiritual suffering — the kind that questions the design of the world itself and will eventually erode their relationship with God, if they had one.

Second, do you think it’s also possible to create paintings, sculpt, compose music, or work with wood and stone alone, in secret? Because in such a case there would truly be no disgusting choices involved. It would be just you and God. You could earn money by producing work as mediocre as possible, calibrated to maximize your earnings, only to build the best chairs, cabinets, sculptures, buildings — and yes, even books — in private, hidden from the rest of the world. I really mean it when I say it would be better to build a cathedral in the desert. Better that than risk the Archbishop of a major metropolis boasting about what a marvelously rich and important figure he must be to have made such a thing happen.

Fortunately, this is not how the world was designed. But it would be, were it not for a cornerstone that hasn’t been mentioned yet. That cornerstone is the Eucharist: the real presence of God, the Lord Jesus, at a particular place and time — really, truly, and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine, whom we can eat and drink. It is the most difficult thing to believe. I know — I came to it from software engineering, from a worldview where claims like this are filed away under superstition without a second thought. Yet once we find a way to make peace with it, the puzzle is suddenly solved. Now there is a place for a cathedral, where our best chairs, cabinets, sculptures, paintings, and architecture fit as appropriately as anything ever could. Now there is a sacred place where we can come to visit Him, who is infinitely larger and more worthy of adoration than the Archbishop of a major metropolis — a place genuinely sacred, where we can genuflect in fascination, worth performing our best music in, worth writing the best books about, also worth writing books that will help others do their best in their own art and craft. It makes possible something worth living for, something higher even than the elimination of suffering — something that will never let us plateau the way we have plateaued until now.

For an artist or craftsman, there can be no better discovery than the Eucharist. Suddenly there is no ceiling on what is appropriate to achieve, no effort that is insanely high, no level of pomp that would be too much. It is suddenly fine to strive for things that are truly extraordinary. At the same time, it explains why some of us feel drawn to churches, and why we find it entirely appropriate to genuflect, pray, and give thanks there — that the cornerstone of the world’s design exists to free us from the chains of a desperate, plateaued life where everything is so mediocre it will be automated before long. Without the Eucharist, all the piety and adoration would have to feel deeply suspicious — as they do for many people today, perhaps more of them now than ever.

In essence, the Eucharist is the crown of the Church’s teaching. But the real question is: how can one make peace with such a strange belief — perhaps the strangest puzzle one has ever encountered? The answer is that in this matter, you can only reconcile your reason in the context of the whole Catholic teaching.

Nobody should expect such a strange puzzle to be explained in one paragraph. But it is my mission to explain it in detail, in terms plausible to this century. As a software engineer — a craftsman of a sort — coming from a non-humanities background, deeply immersed in science and technology, I have written a book that explains the whole picture from scratch. If you are interested, check out Design Patterns of Catholic God.