Brick making 101

Guatemalan brick making recipe:  Dig clay from a field and place in pile.  Mix in water from a bucket and stir with hoe, best done at night with a headlight and ten of your best friends in bare feet.  Let sit overnight.  Add pine needles (gathered from nearby mountains).  Stir.  Pour into single form.  Repeat.  Let dry for four days then turn over.  Let dry for another four days.  Build walls.

As I mentioned in my last post regarding our Guatemalan trip,

our team worked several days to gather truckloads of clay so that our friend Emilio (pictured) might build a kitchen and improve his families' living conditions.  As we swung our picks and shoveled load after load of clay from a pasture in the heat and humidity, how many times did we (our group of mostly Americans) ask about all the technological shortcuts we could take:

Where can we hire a backhoe?  What about just going to the store (a days drive away) to buy some bricks that are already made?  Isn't there any other way to do this that isn't so much hard work?  Why are we using stone age tools (except for the pickup truck) to do this job?  Can't we just hire someone to do all this work?

Then it started to occur to me around day three of our labor camp, largely made up of propsperous, white collared Americans that rarely do manual labor...this is part of the human experience that most of us have lost touch with.  This rythm of hard work, of patient building that takes years to build a house, the deep sleep we all experienced, the teamwork involved in it, the new found joy of jumping in the river at days' end, the taste of simple food when you are hungry to the core, and my favorite...my soul felt completely uncluttered from a world of information and deadlines.

It's amazing to think of the ancient connection between our spirituality and brickmaking.

Making bricks out of clay reminded me of the early civilizations that figured out how to do this. They figured out that bricks were better than rocks for building walls. Bricks could be stacked higher and faster and the walls were stronger and buildings could be built much higher.  It was a massive technological advancement. And what did they do with it?  If you remember the story they screwed it all up, became idolatrous and tried to build a tower to heaven to make a name for themselves. God, in his love for them messed up their little plan, and after that there was alot of babbling going on.

I don't think it was that God didn't like what the bricks would do for them, it's just that he wasn't crazy about what their new found technology did to them.  It made them less than human.  It wasn't his best plan for what it meant to be a human being.

Then I started to think about the ancient Hebrews, enslaved in Egypt, brickmakers by force.  More bricks, less straw, no Sabbath.  It was the enemy of humanity that defined people by how many bricks they could make even though they actually had less material to do it with.  It reduced their human value to a production quota.  In this economy, they weren't human beings, but were reduced to human doings.  And God heard their cry, and delivered them, because in his love for them he messed up their little plan.

Then my mind went back to my pick and shovel.  Our team, all this hard work.  Simple living.  What has all this technology and progress done to me?  In what ways has technology become a way to build a tower to make a name for myself?  Have I embraced unrealistic production quotas in my life which has reduced my value to be quantified by little more than consumer goods?..and it's just never enough?

In this world of compexity, massive information overload, deadlines, and the gravitationaly pull of Wall Street, how do we keep ourselves human?  How do we embrace and utilize our technology without becoming a slave to it?