Come of Age by Stephen Jenkinson

Author:Stephen Jenkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623172107
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2018-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

Arche. This isn’t a word that stands alone in modern English. It is, however, the root of a half-page of words in the standard dictionaries, and it deserves a second look from us now. As an adjective, it means “clever, sly, roguish.” As a prefix, it means something like “chief, principle.” It also has the shade of “first, original,” which is something closer to its Greek beginnings. Already you can sense the dance in the word.

Now consider something simpler: the arch. In the foot, in the doorway of an old building, it is the curved shape that “binds by mutual pressure and can sustain a load.” This dynamic, incarnated meaning gives us something like the primordial sense of the word. The arch was an extraordinary thing once. It was a mythic structure in that it was a nothing that bore up everything that rested or depended upon it. Peasants who had never seen one coming from the countryside to a newly built church to pray couldn’t be persuaded to pass underneath it. They couldn’t tell the diabolical from the divine when they saw it, and for good reason, because the arch marries the two.

The Roman arch was something of a squat, Mediterranean affair. It had a wide stance and a modest soar. The Gothic arch, its northern European grandchild, was a faithful sign of the devotional life of its time. It raced skyward, towards the remote one true God, and it did so by contracting its stance, by narrowing its contact with ground it relied upon. It would have swayed with the first strong breeze or collapsed under its own weight had it not the extraordinary ancillary structures (the flying buttress, for one) way up in the air to replace the wide stance it had forsaken for the sake of leaving this mortal coil.

The arch begins and ends not with the keystone in the middle up in the air, but in the foundation stones upon which all of the building—the arch and all above it—truly rests. And there are two foundations, at least two, to every arch. The word doesn’t mean “beginning,” except to a one-origin believer. It means “beginnings.”

Arche is “that which understands and bears up.” If the ancestral presence, the unseen but attested-to sustaining presence, is the ground of our personal and cultural being—and it is—then the agent of that sustenance is the foundation stones resting upon it, those upon which our personal and cultural lives stand. Those foundation stones are elders, and that under standing and bearing up is what they do for us. Real human life is inconceivable without them. Life without them is anarchy.

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