Freemasons, consider the buildings and the lessons we learned in the Lodge and other Masonic sites. This helps to draw some connections between architecture as metaphor and architecture as life.
A few months ago I wrote here about how non-verbal media can help us with our writing. I talked specifically about music and visual art; today, let’s turn to architecture.
It might sound odd, at first, to think of a built structure as anything but a collection of materials arranged in a way that fulfills a function. A house: a (hopefully comfortable) place to live in, sheltered from the elements. A shopping mall: a sprawling maze in which we can easily spend our money. A gelateria: a worshipping space where we can celebrate our bond with our favorite ice cream deities.
We must remember that everything depends on how we use a material, not on the material itself.
– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
But look a little closer, and you’ll see that the buildings we inhabit and visit frame the types of actions and interactions available to us. They tell stories and…
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Minister Is A Verb 
I’m not, obviously, a Freemason, Tim, but I was just journaling about searching for a home when my youngest son, who is autistic, was eight. We were weary from the search, no house toured quite met our needs, and James bitterly resented the search and the need to move. Then we visited, without much hope, a house in an old neighborhood –it felt exactly right, and when we discovered James missing, we went to find him curled up on the stairs, reading. Some architecture just meshes; we loved that house for five good years.
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