Dear Tate, Vol. 2

on building your life, brick by brick

As a reminder to the readers:

• Dear Tate, Vol. 1

• Dear Mom, Vol. 1

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Dear Tate,

We’ve obviously already talked multiple times since your last letter, but I wanted to reread it to see where we left off before I wrote you back here… If you haven’t in a bit, kiddo, go back and read it again. I think you and I would both agree that more has shifted in your life in the past few weeks than you ever thought possible. So. Much. Has. Happened! And it's been less than a month. My mind is blown, but I’m sure not as much as yours is.

Of course, the specifics of this shifting is for us right now — or, for you to hold onto and enjoy for what it is, and to share with others only when you want — so I’m not really going to directly address it here. But this shift does make me think about how things shift, change, and get built in the world overall.

I’ll get onto the shifty business in just a second. But first: happy birthday! Speaking of blowing my mind, how is it that I have a twenty-year-old? I know every parent says this, but it really does feel like yesterday when you were the toddler drama queen at our dining table in our apartment in Turkey, pouting that you were, and I quote, “bored.” You were annoyed that your dad and I were just hanging out at home enjoying the sweet nothing of a weekend afternoon, dutifully letting you figure out your own entertainment options. This was also the era when you came into the living room and proclaimed, “I just want a hundred people in our house all the time.” Boy, how things have changed, eh? May your birthday celebration be delightfully full of the people you want to spend it with there, and may you not have a hundred people in your house.

You, bored in 2008.

Okay, back to shifts and how things get built.

After all, you are in Europe, land of cathedrals and castles, so right here’s a good example. Last week (has it only been a week? —good gosh) you were in Italy, and you walked into more than a few mind-blowing churches and cathedrals. Several you had been to before, but you were ten years younger and there’s a seismic shift in perspective at that age — plus, we’re Catholic now, and I’m guessing it’s fair to say that has radically shifted your worldview regarding the role played by objective beauty, goodness, and truth in the material goods we humans create and sustain.

So, you have these cathedrals. Take St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, for instance — whose foundation is 1,700 years old, considered by some the most beautiful, largest, and definitely the most awe-inducing with its history. That building took 120 years to build by countless people (mostly nameless, but also, you know, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini) — craftsmen and laborers who, through blueprints and bricks and mortar and mental math, committed to centuries of hard work to collectively create this masterpiece. Entire generations chose to dedicate the work of their hands to labor for which they’d never see the final fruit. They were willing to play a small part in a great project — one dedicated to the greater glory of God — and die while it was still under construction, with no signature attached to their handiwork when it was done.

Cathedrals took literal centuries to build¹, and they were built one brick at a time. One rolled-up sleeve slapping the mortar on the cut stone, put in its place just-so, and left to dry — repeated again and again, ad nauseam, for miles to the sky until they met in the middle as a perfectly configured dome. Our modern mind can’t comprehend this accurately — at least mine can’t. In a world where we’re² annoyed that the construction on the bridge as we leave town is still going on three months later, my microwaved perspective cannot fathom the idea of committing to building a thing that will not only outlive me, it won’t have yet been born before I die.

What is it we are building? Neither you nor I are in the business of literal buildings, but we do build things. We build relationships and the stories that flow from them, and those stories form the foundation of our human flourishing. The stories of your childhood — both the good ones, like meeting Caroline and Meg and them becoming your cherished girlhood friends, and the not-so-good ones, like you throwing up on the sweaty sardine-packed Beijing metro — are bricks in the foundation of your life. These moments are scripted by God, the absolute best (and really, only) storyteller, written just-so in order to tell the bigger story called Your Life. Which, of course, is but a paragraph in the much, much bigger story called God’s Love for All People, but that’s too much of another mind blow for this letter. I’ll stick with bricks here. These bricks are perfectly carved and scripted to shape you into the cathedral, the temple of God, that you are. ...And as you and I have said more than once in the past few weeks, what great scriptwriting in this season of Tate. 10 out of 10, Jesus.

The bricks God is currently slathering with mortar and placing just-so in the beautiful cathedral of your life are the bricks that, Lord-willing, you will look back on with awe. There are cornerstone bricks — pieces of your foundation so crucial that the walls and windows depend on them to stay in place, and then there are smaller, much more commonplace, much more frequently forgotten bricks. There are those monumental conversations, like the one you first had under the Sistene Chapel and later in front of the Colosseum. And then there are the bajillion smaller conversations, like in between bites of gelato as you’re walking down an unnamed cobblestone path in Assisi or as you’re lounging on the couch in the commons area till 1:30 in the morning, chatting about anything and everything. All these bricks are foundational.

Sometimes it’s hard to stay in the moment when you’re told to “cherish the moment,” but as best you can — as you live out all the short vignettes in this season of Tate, take a mental snapshot. Notice the sights, the smells, the sounds, and how they resonate in your mind, body, and soul. Every now and then, go quiet and let the silence resonate in your ears. Witness the awe of your life unfolding. Let the Holy Spirit whisper true things. And also take literal snapshots, because you’ll be glad you did later (I know you’re rolling your eyes at this one, but I mean it — your future self will thank you).

I can imagine you’re wrestling with a daily challenge of staying fully present in the uniqueness of this semester of living at the foothills of the Alps while relishing all the new relationships you’re cultivating, and also having to, you know, study and stuff. But do that part, too — don’t forget to suck the marrow out of all those classes you’re lucky enough to take in an old monastery this semester. Take good notes and share them with me. (I mean, literally — share those notes with me when you get back, because I want to take the classes you’re taking this spring).

I told your dad the other day I’d like to find the button to some physics-altering button apparatus thingy that would allow your time this semester to slow while somehow allowing our time here to speed up. As a teacher, the middle of the second half of the school year is always the most challenging for me, so I’m here in central Texas, already eager for the wildflowers to sprout their spring colors, but not really wanting that yet because it means your semester would be rolling along too fast. I want your February to go slow as molasses and mine to go as fast as microwaving butter from solid to liquid³. If you find that button over there in Austria, push it for me, will you?

Here are the questions I’d love you to answer in your next letter: What have been the highlights of what you’re learning in a purely historic, I’m-studying-abroad-in-Europe sense? And what have been the highlights of what you’re learning about relationships? And in both of those: what are you learning about God and who he is? And also, what was your favorite gelato flavor in Italy?

I love you so much, kiddo. Don’t forget to study, but also don’t forget to hop on that train and see wherever it goes. You’ll learn a ton doing both.

Oh, and eat some fun Austrian dessert for your special day …It’s on me.

Love,

Mom

1. Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to build. …We’ll be going there this summer.

2. And by “we” I of course mean “me.”

3. Reed's immediately suggested metaphors when I asked him for one: as fast as said molasses metabolizes its sugar through the body, as fast as Germany marches through Belgium in a world war, and as fast as a rat spreads a plague through a metaphor.