Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I’m thinking about stuff, preparing for our blessing of backpacks—and phones, ipads, briefcases, brooms, and whatever else you use to make the magic of your work or school happen. Things surround us—books and papers and clothes and dishes and whatever else. On the one hand, I do my best to try to feel unattached. I remember my time this summer in the stark, empty beauty of the Utah red rock wilderness, “needing” only everything I could carry five miles into the woods. Listening to Scripture—Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.—I try to extend this to clothes and books and whatever else I get distracted by.
On the other hand…there can be a thin line between being anti-materialistic and falling into the trap of our disposable culture. Lose one water bottle? Get another. Computer slowing down? You’ll just need a new one soon, go ahead and get it now. It’s just stuff. I recently read Marie Kondo’s book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and it’s 100% materialistic—but in a very careful way I really appreciated. The author is Japanese, and it’s grounded in kind of a Shinto spirituality that asks where you’ve come from and how you want to live your life. After you figure that out, how do your possessions support you in that? If your sister gave you a sweater that you hate and every time you see it hanging in your closet you remember how she doesn’t really know you, it’s time to let it go. It has fulfilled its purpose of being given, and you can say thank you and goodbye and stop feeling bad every time you see it. The question is whether things spark joy. If not, let them go with gratitude. It goes perhaps without saying that in the face of the rampant disrespect for human beings evinced in the European refugee crisis (and some of the toxic language in the US around immigration) that the question of our materialism is pretty minor.
Of ultimate importance or not, in the Christian tradition, we do have a long legacy of blessing things. It’s not 100% heretical to think that our things can bless us back, that God is able to be present with us as we encounter the world around us. I don’t know what Marie Kondo would think about the special candelabrum to be used on St. Blaise’s Day (February 3), for blessings throats. But the material world is important. Jesus was resurrected in his body, and famously told Thomas to put his hand in his side. Our bodies are holy. The earth is holy. These are material things, and they matter, though as with all things the invitation is to keep perspective, not to confuse the thing that helps point us toward God with the immaterial unsayable true nature of God.
Our material surroundings are part of the story of Christ Church, too. In seminary there was an expression that always came up in our liturgics classes: “The building always wins.” You can try to make the most airy, contemporary and laid back liturgy, but if you’re doing it in a space that has more in common with a cave, it’s just not going to happen. But things still grow and change. The building of Christ Church has been as much a living thing as the congregation over the years—it’s changed and grown. In 2006 we put in the freestanding altar in memory of Bob Hughes Sr, and the cross that hangs over the high altar was a gift from Muriel Nurse in memory of her mother. She told me the story of how she and Father Bill had chosen it out of a catalog and “hoped for the best” waiting for it to be shipped from England. 42 years later, I think it still works.
So our building, and our community, continues to grow and change. See the announcement from vestry below about the Stations of the Cross—another decision, another opportunity to say “yes” to something new or “no, that’s not right for this place.” Please let us know what you think, and don’t forget to bring your backpack or gear for work or school this Sunday!
Blessings,
Sara+