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Holy Week resources and reflections

Bricks and mortar

by Robert Hoch

ONE EVENING, SITTING IN THE BACK PATIO, we were struck by the sight of our children’s bikes in the yard. My wife Rebecca wondered about the fate of our own childhood bikes: “Where are they now?” she asked.

“In a landfill somewhere,” I said. “Where else?”

That is not what she meant. She meant something deeper, as in: Where is the freedom of our own childhood, the wonder and excitement of discovery, that sense of childlike fun symbolized in a child’s bike?

Her question continues to strike a chord for me and not just in terms of a beloved bicycle and all it represented: It suggests the sorts of issues confronting people in the church, people who knew the church when it was full, but now see its remains, its less than robust condition.

Some will assert that the church, as we have known it, was misbegotten, more fit for the landfill than the promise. Part of me nods in agreement. Yet I hesitate when the psalmist recalls Israel’s temple. The psalmist sings with affection of that place, of its bricks and mortar: “For your servants hold its stones dear, and have pity on its dust” (Psalm 102:14).

Mostly, I struggle to connect with this psalm, at least when I think of the church, of its problems. But as I think of our home, it seems heartless to be so cavalier about place, about bricks and mortar.

I look at the leafy bluffs opposite us, on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River. I consider the lawn in our backyard, patchy and uneven. I think of the stairs that will creak with the quiet-but-sure steps of our children when they wake in the morning. I remember our kitchen, site of countless early morning coffees and bowls of oatmeal. I notice again the paint peeling away from the windows, a decaying house patient with my neglect.

I feel that the memory of my little life is sealed within them somehow, that should I lose those creaky stairs, or that lumpy, weed infested garden; should I lose the lilac tree we planted when my daughter Imogen was born; should I lose the sandbox our children play in — I feel somehow that I will lose part of them, part of myself.

Is that not part of our dilemma in the church? That we sense that some part of ourselves, our memory of God, is sealed up in these stones?

Annie Dillard seems to speak to this tension within our churchly life when she recalls the story of Moses, how he demanded to see God’s glory. Of course, God refuses to show Moses his glory, or at least not his full glory. Instead, God puts Moses in a cleft of a rock, famously showing Moses the divine posterior: “Just a glimpse, Moses: a clift in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing.”

“You have to stalk everything,” writes Dillard. Or “you can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage. … I am both waiting becalmed in a clift of the rock and banging with all my will, calling like a child beating on a door: come on out! … I know you’re there.”

It’s true, what she says about the paradox of longing and refuge, about restless yearning and being steeped in the calming sanctuary of the familiar, in the stones and dust of our little cleft in the rock.

“It is all touch and go,” writes Dillard.

ROBERT HOCH is ordained as a teaching elder in the PC(USA) and serves as a theological educator at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. His most recent major publication “By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile” lifts up the symbols of the church as exilic community.

 

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