Builder of bastion

Who wants to build a tower

Tourists whose guided Florence stops in front of the Church of St. St. Lawrence (San Lorenzo). They hear the interpretation that it should be one of the cleanest Renaissance architectures. They look distrustful. It stands on a noisy marketplace, which itself does not attract anything nice, and behind him rises ugly wall. The church is unfinished. He lacks the exterior facade. The whole beauty of harmonious arches and columns is inside. So whoever comes out from inside and looks at the wall again, sighs, “Too bad they didn’t finish it!” Several of the famous temples are unfinished. The Gothic cathedrals are mostly towers. They are lower than originally planned. So they are as an illustration of the Gospel text: “Whoever wants to build a tower, let him consider whether he has to complete it” (cf. Luke 14: 28-30). In normal daily life we ​​do not build towers, but only residential houses. If we didn’t get them, we wouldn’t be able to get in, so we’re mostly prudent in this business. But it is worse with towers in the figurative sense. They are referring to this parable of the Gospel. The student plans his studies as a tower. In the end, the doctorate should be like a dome. But how many such student towers are unsuccessful! They did not rise high. Do they serve anything else? Some studies are applicable even if they are not completed. Others remain just debris.

How do such “unfinished symphonies” arise? They point out character errors, nerve weakness, the habit of running away from work. Happy children who have learned to work hard since their childhood. This makes the work easy and usually goes well. But the question is not just pedagogical. The work is connected with spiritual progress and growth of personality. But there are breakthroughs for the worse, but also for the better. We often see one of these positive breakthroughs in our daily lives. A young girl usually has the virtues and indecency of young girls. He wants to look good, runs away from work neatly and runs wherever he can have fun. The admonishment laughs. “What of you, girl, will you!” They lament in the family. But still she is nice and gets married. The first child will come. We observe a direct miracle as it changed her. With how conscientiously he is paying attention to the child. How much patience he develops when he has to get up at night because the baby is crying. Where did it come from? It is a sense of responsibility that cured recklessness. She realized that the child had no one but her. So she must do everything she can to disappoint the role. Inspired by this experience, the founder of Scouting Baden Powell began to lead the boys into the countryside to sleep under the tents they build and to eat what they cook themselves. City life has deprived youth of responsibility. Everything is finished at home. There’s nothing to do. Otherwise, it is under the tent. If he stands up badly, the wind will blow him up at night; if it is drained badly, the water flows in. This must not happen the second time.

But how much sense of responsibility does he have when one is able to realize how important a mission from God himself is. The world is immense. It resembles a huge carpet with a colorful image woven into it. Individual people are like colored threads. Each is in its place. Or let’s say the world is a mosaic. Each of us is a pebble, irreplaceable by another. It is not conceivable that anyone could leave his place and his mission, not to finish what God was called to do. The unfinished tower in this case is a sin building, the Tower of Babel. Seeking God’s will in life and working with God’s calling is the best remedy against instability and the ruins of futile plans. And yet even saints will show some incredible carelessness. The work of life collapsed, and they remained calm and smiled at the rubble. Doesn’t the life of Jesus look like it with profane eyes? He preached, gathered the disciples and chose the apostles. But in the end everyone fled, leaving him at the hardest moment. The people he did well, who saw his miracles, renounced him and preferred the villain Barnabas. Then came the resurrection and the pilgrimage of the Church to the whole world. Or St. Paul, the apostle of the nations, in full labor, promisingly begun, ends in prison and is beheaded in Rome, where he appealed to be righteous with the Emperor as a Roman citizen. Peter and other apostles have the same fate. Yet they did not despair of failure, they did not speak of the crisis of the Church. They did not call their work sadly unfinished, but promised begun. This is what St. Paul in a letter from a Roman prison. His chains are a guarantee that the gospel continues and spreads.

It is quite different when someone works alone and sees that they are fading and watching death approach. A professor who had a book in progress was injured by a stroke. He is still conscious, but cannot move. He looks sadly at a pile of papers and sighs, “All of this was a job in vain, no one appreciates it, it burns.” His colleague is incomparably better off. He himself began to edit the big vocabulary, reached halfway through. But then he stopped, “I want to rest a bit. I don’t have to bother. My assistant got so much into the job that he finished it by me-