Build thee more stately mansions, o my soul, as the swift seasons roll . . . (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
I was 16 years old when I first read The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and I can still remember where I was sitting in English class, and the feel and musty smell of the old textbook out of which I was reading it. Because in that moment I knew . . . even though this land-locked mountain teenager didn’t have a clue what a chambered nautilus was . . . I knew that “building more stately mansions” was exactly what we should all be about, that this should be our purpose. I had only a hazy sense of what this kind of spiritual journey would be like, but the idea appealed to my idealistic self. In retrospect, it would have been a lot easier to have gone out for basketball.
But I was neither wired nor built for basketball. And I guess I was wired for envisioning those mansions, and embued with a fervent desire to assist others in doing so as well. Whether they wanted it or not, by gum.
Along the way, I learned what a chambered nautilus is, a mollusk with a splendidly segmented, spiral shell, enabling it to handily move to a larger room as it grows. And I also learned the fallacy of evangelistic fervor, and the total arrogance on my part of thinking that I knew the path that anyone other than myself needed to walk (or in this case, what mansions they needed to build). A lotta times God had to tell me to “get out of the way, I’ll do it myself.”
It has been my privilege to walk alongside many people on portions of their individual journeys, sometimes shining the light a little further down the path when it was dark and they couldn’t see. I learned that the most I could do was be present. That was humbling. And one of my very best “stately mansions.”