For several years of my young adult life, I lived in Dresden, in what used to be East Germany.

This city was decimated during WWII, and people still wonder whether the bombing by the British was entirely strategic, or partly in retaliation for the levelling of several British cities by the Germans. Coventry was one of those cities, with beautiful cathedrals that were turned to rubble by German bombers. In Germany, after the destruction, the people of Dresden walked past the remains of their beloved Frauenkirche for 60 years, and finally must have given up hope that it could ever be whole again. But while I was there, in 2000, construction began, and now there is a beautiful church there that is a wonderful replica of the original.

Among the donations to the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche, many came from the people of Coventry, who understood the German people’s pain. Finally, the cross that would crown the building was made by the son of one of the British bombers, from nails retrieved out of the destroyed Coventry cathedral.

Not only is this an allegory about finding enough hope to make ourselves whole again, but it is about hope coming from unlikely sources and in unexpected ways.

Every day, after a long shift in the Emergency Room, I sit down at my desk to dictate, write or to read. I plop myself into my chair, clear aside enough clutter from the desk to fit my laptop, push a few boxes out of the way and begin my work. With incoming climbing magazines, medical provider journals, and masonic books, handouts or articles, I lovingly look at the covers and, not ready to throw them away quite yet, but not having time yet to read them, I balance them on top of the dozens of others (still in their plastic wraps) and loose another few inches of office space. Gradually, my movement becomes more and more restricted as I paint myself into a corner of free space till I finally reach a tipping point; I have to fight back.

I declare a clear desk policy and pounce on the chaos, determined to beat it into submission. I banish some scribbled notes to recycling; then I shuffle a few items over to a different pile behind my chair, to file later; but that stack of pads and post-it-note might have useful information, and I don’t have time to decide right now what is vital. So I end up reclaiming maybe half of my desk, and leaving the other half for another day and another battle.

It’s uncomfortable to live this way – constantly reminded of all the things that need doing, by the pieces of paper and books and letters scattered around. It’s like buying a house, and living in one room of it while the rest is used for storage. Why don’t I just sweep through the office until it is all in order, and then keep it that way? But it would take too long to sweep through (I never have the time), and I don’t have the system to keep it in order afterwards.

It’s a metaphor for living inside an imperfect person. Our faults are irritating, and they reduce our efficiency. We wish that we could clean them all up once and for all, but even if we could wipe it all clean, we’d be back with a mess in a few days. It’s not a question of whether we have a messy office – everyone’s life is imperfect and messy – and it’s not just a question of hanging in there until we figure out how to tidy it; we simply can’t be hanging on, ignoring the mess, for the next few eons. As pressing as the question is regarding how to make things tidy, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to live with the disarray without losing our sanity.

We all know that we need to feel a little uncomfortable about our imperfections and shortcomings in order to motivate us to improve. But if the pain of imperfection engulfs the little flame of hope that keeps us moving, we are liable to just roll over give up.

We are all less than perfect – in fact we are all pretty much at the same stage in our quest for becoming the perfect ashlar – and our shortcomings are bound to bring us a bit of misery. But there must be just the right amount of irritation to highlight our faults without overwhelming us. When an oyster encounters a grain of sand, it ever so slowly turns it into a beautiful pearl. But if 1000 grains of sand bombarded it, maybe it would just throw in the towel.

Every day we wake up a different person than we were yesterday; our body has replaced or added several billion cells in the past few hours; our brain has developed millions of new neuron pathways; it no longer thinks the same way; we have a different perspective from the one we had just minutes ago. And yet we treat ourselves as if we have arrived; despite the fact that our opinion has changed several hundred thousand times, we are absolutely sure that we are now correct, that our current perspective is the only true one, and the whatever label we give ourselves right now is who we are. But today’s selfie is not who we are, who we are remains to be seen.

In fact we are billions of years old. Since before the solar system came into being we have been trying to emulate the Grand Architect, or at least Godly attributes. I like to imagine that we have been going to character building summer camps and galaxy design classes, and who knows what. And here we are – still getting angry at the guy who cuts in front of us on the highway. We’ve had billions of years to become better people, and we’ve still not made it. Maybe we are expecting too much of ourselves to become perfect in a few decades.

Even worse – after watching too many sitcoms, we expect everything to be solved in 30 minutes. As our life movie rolls on, and frame after frame shows no improvement, like the rubble in Dresden, we see no possible path from a ruin to a beautiful monument. When we become convinced that there can’t possibly be a happy ending, how do we hold onto the hope of a better self?

As Ishmael says in Moby Dick: ‘we are all cracked in the head, and badly in need of fixing’. We are all pitiful sheep and have lost our way in one thing or another. Each of us needs continual rescuing, and it is our job, as brothers, to rescue each other when and where we can. Beyond the next degree, the color of the ribbon we wear, the secret knowledge we think we obtained, the superiority we believe we hold, our motto as a brotherhood must be: to do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can. And that we intend to do so for as long as we can! Remembering that we are endowed with a competency of His divine wisdom and power.

Surely… if man can take the ruins, rubble and remains of a broken city and rebuild an awe-inspiring structure that rises towards the heavens, how much more capable is the Father of the Universe to restore His children who feel broken or destroyed? I assure you, there is no life so shattered that it cannot be restored, no position of the fraternity that cannot be rebuilt or remodeled.

We, each one of us, need to take up the builder’s tools and get to work. We must extend our hands to one another and help our brother shine, rejoicing in his success. Our lost brethren can be reclaimed, our future brethren can be recruited, our fraternity can be restored. But these rescuing efforts may go on for a long long time. But there is no greater work than the efforts we put forth for our brethren.

In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written “the kingdom of God is within man”. I dare say that this kingdom is neither in one man nor a group of men, but in all men. In you. And in me. We, as the people have the power, the power to create happiness, the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure, most of all to show the kind love of the Grand Master of the Universe.

Neil Tyson deGrasse, astrophysicist and cosmologist, once said,

“The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.

These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.

These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.

So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small because they’re small and the universe is big—but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity.

That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings-on of activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU

That is precisely what we are, by being together.

We are all connected, we are all relevant. Humans seek opportunity to frequently feel that and be active participants in the great workings around us. One of the great truths taught within the walls of love and truth is that we are not stuck with the nature we were born with. We can change and transform ourselves into better men, just as we can change our surroundings.