Horizontal and Vertical

From the October, 2016 WORD of Saint Timothy's Episcopal Church

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” I Corinthians 12:27

The then-director of music Filippa Duke gave me a clear warning before services on my first Sunday morning at Saint Timothy’s .  “It will be the longest peace you’ve ever seen.”  She was right, of course.

The five to seven (and sometimes ten?) minutes of warm greetings in the middle of the Sunday Eucharist certainly is a notable feature of your life here.  It’s wonderful to see someone back after an extended illness being warmly welcomed, and children chatting with people older than their grandparents.  When the peace is passed here, people embrace across lines of race, class, and political conviction that keep us apart so starkly in our wider society. 

It’s still not my favorite thing about your common life (and I breathed a sigh of relief when told it wouldn’t be nearly as long at my next parish), but I’ve come to see that there’s something deeply important about it. 

Ponder: "investing products with transcendence"

"Ad executive Douglas Atkin notes that a transformation has taken place in what's expected of the typical ad executive at a major corporation: rather than being responsible for design, packaging, and promotion, the brand manager is now asked to 'create and maintain a whole meaning-system for people through which they get identity and an understanding of the world.' Advertising is asked to induce devotion by investing products with transcendence.  So Atkin asked himself, What makes people exhibit cult-like devotion?  He thus undertook a study of cults precisely in order to figure out how brands could induce 'loyalty beyond reason.' When he heard people rhapsodize about sneakers of paper plates in terms that he described as 'evangelical,'  he realized that people join brands for the same reason they join cults and religions: to make meaning...The goal of such marketing, this (very secular) documentary concludes, is 'to fill the empty places where non-commercial institutions like schools and churches might have once done the job.' They amount to 'an invitation to a longed-for lifestyle."

James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom.