As a sign of the covenant we have made with one another:
To sustain, support, encourage, and love one another.
May this place ever be the workshop of our finest endeavors,
And the cradle of our highest hopes and noblest dreams.
So let it be, Amen.
The congregation shares the pieces of tangerine—some with skill, some with an awkwardness that produces smiles and laughter. The sweet smell of juice floats across the room. There is some minor commotion as loose seeds roll under a chair pursued by a zealous child. Ushers pass baskets to collect napkins and peels. At the minister’s gesture to rise, there is this parting affirmation:
We need each other, and so we come to this place—
To work and dance and laugh and cry and think.
We call ourselves a religious community—
Not because this place is in itself holy ground,
But because what we do here and say here and are here
Make it so.
So let it be, Amen.
So how did it go? I wish I could say it was overwhelmingly successful and ever since that day the congregation observes a tangerine communion. But not so. Why? Well, it’s hard to say exactly. While most people went along with the experience, and nobody actually objected, even when asked, there wasn’t a groundswell of enthusiasm for that particular act of community. The congregation seemed to understand what I was getting at, but this wasn’t quite it. It was messy and awkward and too much of a departure from something they knew.
“But,” they seemed to say, “keep trying.”
The experimentation continued. Wanting to stay on a level the children could understand, we used animal crackers one Sunday. Animal crackers have a long history. They’ve been around since 1890, and Nabisco hasn’t changed the box since 1902. Animal crackers are often shared. Good idea. But when the crackers were passed in baskets, some small children got worked up over not having their choice of animals. The wail went up from more than one child. “I want a gorilla. How come he gets a gorilla, and I don’t?” Even more unhappy were those who got a maimed animal or just a part. “I don’t want a leg—I want a whole zebra!” An entire basket of animal crackers was spilled when two children tried sorting through the cookie zoo at the same time.
I could see the expressions on the faces of my congregation. They were a goodwilled, good-humored, and patient lot, but the expressions said, “Nice try, Reverend—better luck next time.”
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I don’t give up easily.
We tried Gummi Bears, jelly beans, and M&M’s (which do, too, melt in your hands, especially in church). The all-time lulu was something called Pop Rocks—a grape candy loaded with carbon dioxide that sort of exploded in your mouth when you bit down on it, producing a lavender froth around the lips and a purple stain on tongues that lasted a couple of days. (“What happened to your mouth?” “I went to church on the wrong Sunday.”)
Then, too, there was a health problem. A family physician noted that if I was looking for a way to spread cold germs among a congregation, I had devised some genius-level methodology.
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Many years later, three dimensions of these communion events stand out in my mind.
First of all, they are classic examples of the difficulty of constructing new rituals on top of well-established tradition. Reformation is never simple, never easy, never quick. It’s easily foundered on the rocks of the past. The revision of the sacred habits of a religious community always takes time and is seldom well received by all. I find this applied to similar attempts to settle on an agreeable grace at the dinner table in my own home.
Second, the congregation really did understand what I was after. They wanted the same thing I did. They appreciated my efforts to find acts of community that would authentically express our feelings about one another. The words I used were right-on—it was the specific act that had problems, not the intention.
Finally, all these wiggy attempts produced a great deal of laughter and will long be fondly remembered and recounted by members of the congregation. That’s a very important statement, not to be overlooked. This laughter is holy. You’ll never convince me that Jesus and his companions did not also laugh together, even at the final supper.
Now, from this long look back, I’ve come to understand what I missed the first time. That shared laughter—mixed with shared purpose and longing—that was the act of community. The enthusiasm with which we recall our memories—the ritual of remembering—proves it. We had communion, after all. We were looking for something important together, and in the search we found the spirit of the companionship.
TALISMANS
Earlier I spoke of the drawing my daughter and I made of our overlapped hands as a “talisman,” using a word that belongs in a list along with amulets, charms, and fetishes.
These words are most commonly found in anthropology texts concerning the ritual practices of so-called primitive peoples. That’s a very limited view. Amulets, talismans, and charms abound in the lives of everyone in every time and place. They are physical signs of relationships with people and places and experiences. They are symbols of connection and reconnection, union and reunion with what is sacred to us. We wear them around our necks, wrists, and fingers. We carry them in our wallets, purses, and pockets. We hang them on our walls, place them on our mantels, and store them in boxes and drawers.
This afternoon my wife and I took time to collect some of these objects and assemble them in a package to send to my second son as a gesture of our support when he takes a major examination next week. We wouldn’t say we were assembling talismans. But an anthropologist would smile at our naïveté.
My wife and I like to think of ourselves as intelligent, rational, educated, and fully modern in our thinking. We would testify in court that we do not believe in magic or voodoo or supernatural properties of natural phenomena.
As to the son: After nine years of education, training, and practical experience, he is sitting for his professional engineering examination, as required and prepared by the state of Washington. His field is electronic engineering with a specialty in fiber-optic applications. This is cutting-edge technical stuff. What’s more, he’s taking the exam early, fully knowing that the pass rate is very low the first time around. It’s always been his way to risk the long shot.
As to our gift: If you opened the package, you would find a small wooden box. Lifting the lid, you’d see a faded neckerchief—the red-and-blue kind used on hiking trips. Unwrapping the neckerchief, you would find a small cloth bag, within which are these items:
a Japanese coin
a black-and-white African trade bead
a very small fossilized chambered-nautilus shell
a small stick of charred wood from a tree hit by lightning
a little leather thong with three beads on it—one of turquoise, one of amber, and one of human bone
a tiny bronze hand, open in blessing
several photographs
Parting with some of these items was not easy for me.
I could tell you a long story about each one—each is connected to some important event or place in my life or the life of my son. When I die, he will find such keepsakes among my possessions and wonder what they were about. Better I should give them to him now and explain. Maybe he can use now the imagination they might provoke.
To keep your parent license active, you must always give your children some part of yourself as long as they and you live. He knows about this already, because he has two children of his own, which means he knows what’s in the package from me isn’t just any old stuff.
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What’s going on here?
What is this collection of objects supposed to mean?
Where did it come from?
Isn’t this really a little strange?
And doesn’t it seem like a rather elaborate out-of-all-proportion gesture—he’s just taking a test, right?
Inside the family circle, suc
h an event is a catalyst for a larger set of feelings that haven’t been expressed in a while. We recognize, from time to time, that we take each other for granted and will seize upon almost any opportunity to express larger feelings. It’s why some birthdays get wonderfully out of hand and turn into a celebration of the life of the person. This is the nature of the rites of private relationships.
Give me access to your most personal space—desk or bureau drawers, jewelry box and closets, and I wager I could lay my hands on your own amulets, talismans, and charms. Even simpler, a glance at your fingers, wrists, neck, earlobes, pockets, purse, or wallet will turn up solid evidence that you, too, believe in magic.
Sometimes these items are put in a special place in an organized fashion—usually on a dresser top at home or a desktop or shelf at work. Little framed photographs, a rock or two, something a kid made at school, a key, a bronzed baby shoe, a little jar of dried flower petals and—well, you know. Shrines, altars. These are not accidental assemblages of sentimental detritus. They are the physical evidence of the ritual of remembrance.
In the long-distant past, it was felt that evil spirits had a palpable presence, and could enter the body through its orifices if powerful talismans were not worn to guard the doorways of our being. To protect themselves, our forefathers and foremothers wore bones through their noses and ears, wore rings and bracelets to provide a barrier to evil going up their veins, and wore necklaces bearing crosses, crescents, stars, and complex magical shapes.
Look on you and around you.
All this stuff is about ritual power.
In a rational sense, my gesture toward my son carries this invested power—the power of my love for him. But there’s also the power of the second law of sympathetic magic—those things and people once closely attached continue to affect each other even though they are a long distance apart. We give each other tokens of this ongoing connection, saying, “I’m thinking of you. Remember me—keep in touch.”
In a nonrational realm, this little package for my son is an acknowledgment of all those feelings and concerns and beliefs for which I have no adequate language or explanation—a gesture toward the mystery and power I only sense but cannot describe or control. It’s serious business, a gift of solemn import.
The most modern form of these rites of preservation is the photograph.
When people are asked what they would take with them if their house were on fire and they knew everything would burn, the most overwhelming reply is “photographs.” And the older you get, the more important the photograph albums become. Little images on paper. Precious memories. You will look at the photographs again and again and again. They are the visual evidence of place and time and relationships. Ritual talismans for the treasure chest of the heart.
CONVENTIONS
Recently, I was a guest at what I now think of as a “reunion of the Church of the Burning Building.” A newspaper article more literally described the event as a statewide convention of the members of professional and volunteer fire departments and their families. For me, the convention had all the marks of a religious gathering, and led me to some conclusions about the significance of our urge to come together in large groups. Conventions are a special form of reunion.
Vocational researchers say that the profession with the highest satisfaction rate among its membership is firefighting. By and large, the firefighters like who they are and what they do. Most of the rest of us hold them in high esteem, as well.
Remember your first-grade-class field trip to the fire station?
When an elementary school teacher invited me to come along once again, I went with enthusiasm and was no less impressed than I had been fifty years ago. And I’ve returned on my own to talk with firefighters several times since. Members of the Volunteer Fire Department of Moab, Utah, and two retired members of the San Francisco Fire Department—a captain and a lieutenant—generously opened their lives to me. When I went to the firefighters’ convention, I experienced the fervor of their sense of community.
The firefighters’ motto is “Service.”
Their values are courage, caring, community, knowledge, and physical fitness.
Many are cross-trained to be emergency medical technicians.
They are organized like soldiers, but their war is not against people. Their enemies are fire, destruction, disaster, and human suffering. As in combat, they eat together, sleep together, train together, and brave danger together. As in combat, they must be able to rely on one another when things go wrong. And, as in combat, they must be able to handle injury and death—to themselves and others. When they speak of a “baptism of fire,” they’re not using metaphor.
Off duty, they play together and socialize together.
They hold contests and competitions, combining work skills and fun.
They have their awards and commendations—even bands and drill teams.
They hone their skills into unconscious habits—until their job requirements and their way of life are one.
Firefighters become part of a larger family—and take care of their own in times of injury, death, and disaster, whether to themselves or to their wives or husbands or children.
What they do for their living gives their lives meaning and purpose and structure—which is something that most of us couldn’t say. The structure and activities of their world parallel the structures and activities of a formalized religion.
I don’t know if the Church of the Burning Building saves souls, but it saves lives, inspires the young, and dignifies the ideals of human community.
It’s no wonder our culture observes the educational ritual of the visit to the firehouse. It’s no wonder that when we ask children what they want to be when they grow up, we often get the answer: “Firefighter!” Here is a near-ideal form of human community. No wonder they come together in conventions—it’s a family reunion.
There are many secular churches.
I’ve seen several hundred in action.
You may belong to one.
If you reviewed my schedule for the last several years, you would see I have attended annual gatherings of associations of teachers, lawyers, nurses—and such organizations as the National Tire Dealers and Retreaders Association, the Bowling Proprietors of America, the American Society of Military Comptrollers, the National Paint and Coatings Association, the Rotary International, the Salvation Army, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the National Rural Electric Co-Op Association, just to mention a few of the more intriguing ones.
They ask me to come and speak to them. I go because I want to see them. I’ve long been curious about what brings people together and what they do when they get there and what those gatherings have in common. It’s another mirror in which I may see myself and learn something.
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Americans are joiners.
And every association has its conventions, conferences, retreats, assemblies, seminars, convocations, or meetings.
Every city in the United States has a complex of convention facilities, and these facilities are associated with some kind of entertainment district. Las Vegas and Disneyworld/Orlando are extreme examples, but almost every city worth its salt has a convention center of some kind, connected to the development of the Old Town or the riverfront or some theme such as the Wild West or country music—something combining play and nostalgia.
Convention centers have become a version of the medieval cathedral, which was built with some religious purpose, of course, but of equal importance, to give status to the community, to provide jobs, to attract trade fairs, tourists, and business.
Convention centers are the basilicas of secular religion.
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What’s this all about?
We associate with other people like us to affirm ourselves. We come for people reasons, not professional reasons. Loneliness is one great burden of being a solitary human being. To spend time in the company of others who have our concerns, values, interests, beliefs, or occupati
on is to get confirmation of who we are—to feel connected to a larger image of ourselves.
It’s true that many gatherings seem concerned only with business—with products, sales, and economic gain. What’s wrong with that? What we do for a living defines much of who we are, and being with other people who make and sell potato peelers or whatever is no less important to those who come together than any other event that draws people together. The judgment of the value of the convention is made by those who are involved, not outsiders who see only the surface.
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Consider the typical annual convention of any association.
On the surface of it, we come together to accomplish work, to share ideas, to make plans to lobby society or government on our common behalf. Every gathering, regardless of size, has a formal agenda—a program. Every gathering has business to do, speakers to hear, products to consider, and officers to elect. This work is the stated justification for the gathering. Serious purpose. A way of saying to ourselves that who we are and what we do is important.
Less publicly apparent is another agenda. We go to get away from home and office—to get a break from the ruts and be off the hook of daily routine. We go to see friends and comrades or be with wives and husbands, or to get away from same. We go to play golf or be a bit of a tourist—to see New Orleans or San Francisco or wherever.
We go to get new ideas, new energy, confirmation of who we are and what we do. This is recreation. A serious word—re-creation—a re-newal of self. If a convention is truly successful, this is what happened to you.
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The inner group of any organization gives it a huge place in their lives.
Members of boards and committees, officers, longtime delegates, come to know each other well, see each other and work together across the years, get recognition at conventions, and receive awards and commendations. Their photographs appear in programs and newsletters, and upon retirement they are celebrated.
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