United Church of Two Harbors

An old homiletics professor of mine once said, "Never repeat for emphasis. Never repeat for emphasis."

The fact is repetition is one of the best ways to get something into your deep memory. When I go to visit elderly people who have lost most of their memory and are largely incommunicative the sure way to get them talking is to pray the Lord's Prayer. Suddenly silence turns to prayer as their lips move in synch with those old familiar words and I can feel a spark present.

Repetition of our prayers and liturgy also has an impact on the young. About four years ago when Bernick's Pepsi workers were on strike Emma was wondering why I wouldn't buy Pepsi products. I tried to explain, as best I could to a 9 year old, about workers' rights and the power of collective bargaining where individuals might fail, but the whole can stand together.

To which she said, "Oh, sort of like 'we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.'"

I blinked and said, "You've been paying attention."

"Well," she said, "you say it ALL the time."

Of course, I don't say it ALL the time. Only when we are celebrating communion. But those ideas in the prayers of the church that are repeated often enough start to grow roots in our psyche and we can't help but make connections. We start to see the world around us through the lens of our repeated prayers and scriptures.

It is meaningful to me when, at the close of communion, we pray...

"We thank you, Lord, for this holy mystery in which you have give yourself for us. Now send us forward, in the strength of your Spirit, to give ourselves for others."

I think about that a lot. God gives completely to us - body, life, blood, spirit - and so in the face of this complete and utter giving of self we are compelled to do likewise. It's like breathing. God gives. We receive. We give. The cycle goes on.

What prayer or scripture that we repeat has found its way into your heart and soul? How has it changed you? If you could commit one or two prayers or passages of scripture to memory what would they be?

I just purchased a new house or, rather, a new mortgage. I tell my kids that I own 3% of this house and it's whatever 3% I'm in, so if you want to be in the house that we own, you have to stay within the same 45 square feet that I'm in.

Packing and unpacking, as anyone who moves can tell you, is a real spiritual experience. You pick up hundreds of objects - from teaspoons to sofas, from toothbrushes to a ceramic spoonrest made by your son - and you have to ask yourself, each time you pick up an object, "Do I keep this? Do I give it away? Do I throw it away? Does this thing have a place in my life? Do I value it?"

More often than not a kind of ownership inertia sets in. "I've moved this object for the last four moves so I might as well move it again." But I tried this time to be really intentional about what I moved and why. A new house means a new opportunity to organize my life. It's both daunting and exhilarating.

As I was moving into my new abode (with many thanks to those people out there who helped me move) a scripture came to me over and over again in a way I'd never heard it before. In Revelation 21 as the nations enter the New Jerusalem, which has descended pristine and pure from the sky, the writer mentions that "nothing unclean will enter it." That it will always remain pristine and pure. And I want my new house to be like that. Oh, how I long for it to be like that.

But I already know, as much as I want to, it will not be so. There will be mud and there will be messes. There will be clutter and there will be chaos. In spite of my best intentions, my house will not be spotless. And, eventually, like the way of all flesh it will pass away, by cataclysm or natural decay. I was reminded of that too when I signed my insurance papers.

That said, I don't think it's a bad impulse to be mindful of what we bring into our houses. The things we keep, the stuff we store, say much about us. To paraphrase the recently deceased comedian, George Carlin, what is a house if it's not a place for our stuff? And the stuff we keep says as much about us as the stuff we leave behind.