By: Jim Taylor

Ideas in storage

“This week,” wrote my friend Wayne Holst with obvious relief, “I moved 4,000 books from my library to the University of Calgary Library.”

        I was impressed at the size of his collection. Especially since that’s not all of it. As he added, “My home library remains adequate.”

        After getting Wayne’s e-mail, I checked my own library. I discovered that Joan and I have about 2500 books. Plus half a dozen boxes that we haven’t unpacked since we moved here. But if we haven’t even looked at them in 14 years, I’m not sure I can legitimately include them in our inventory.

        I can’t think of any library that would want to take our collection, though. Some parts of it, maybe.

        But libraries need to be selective about what they accept.

        So do museums.

Community attic

        For several years, I was president of our local museum society. Often, the curator and I would get a call something like this: “We’re clearing my mother’s house out before we sell it. Do you want to see if there’s anything that the museum could use?”

        Sometimes, we got a real find. Someone’s private distillery. A box of still legible diaries. A phonograph that plays wax cylinders. A homemade butter churn or washing machine…

        More often, we simply added another chipped enamel mug, cast-iron frying pan, or rusty pitchfork to the museum’s existing stock.

        The museum became, in effect, the “community attic.” Objects people no longer had much use for, but that they weren’t quite ready to give up yet, ended up stored in the museum.

        Sometimes I think the church may be like that too.

        Except that instead of physical objects, it preserves ideas and concepts.

Being selective

Long ago, Druids, Wiccans, and Jews all built their worship calendars around the cycles of planting and reaping.

        Throughout the Middle Ages, European peasants still organized their lives around the Christian seasons. They fasted and feasted in accordance with a religious calendar.

        Islam still does.

        But in today’s urban world, few people have much direct connection to seed-time and harvest. In heated or air-conditioned buildings, inside buses and subways, behind closed windows in automobiles, many people barely experience the changing seasons for more than a few minutes a day.

        People profess their undying commitment to doctrines such as the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the Ascension – but few can cite a single instance of how that doctrine might have altered their behaviour on any given workday.

        No one in North America depends on unleavened bread any more. (One part water, three parts flour, pinch of salt, kneaded, rolled thin, baked on a hot rock, according to Donna Sinclair’s new book, The Spirituality of Bread.) Even homeless transients and people travelling on the cheap expect to find regular bread.

Except in religious liturgies. Where replacing tasteless wafers with Tim Horton’s donuts could imperil any priest’s vocational advancement.

        Libraries and museums cannot, and should not, attempt to preserve everything dumped on their doorstep.

        Neither, I suggest, should churches.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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