For Wilshire Baptist Church
I had just spent several hours hauling two cubic yards of pea gravel to different locations in the yard and walked into the mud room from the garage where I froze for a moment. The mud room was sparkling clean, as was the rest of the house in preparation for an event we were hosting the next day, and I didn’t want to get it dirty. But isn’t the mud room called “the mud room” for a good reason? Isn’t that where we’re supposed to kick off our muddy shoes, strip off our dirty clothes, and wrap up in a towel before stepping into the clean house?
It sort of reminds me of that ironic scene in “Dr. Strangelove,” the classic Cold War film, when a scuffle breaks out at the Pentagon and the president rushes in and declares, “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
This question of what to do with our dirty clothes and warring dispositions has often confounded the church. On one side are those who say church is the place to get clean and get right, and on the other side are those who say you can’t come to church until you clean yourself up – it being holy ground and all that.
But we live in a world that is dirty and difficult, and that raises more questions: How do we keep the faith? How do we keep from becoming hopelessly mired in the mud? How do we transform the mud into something good?
I may have heard an answer this past Sunday in our Ephipany class at Wilshire, when Malcolm Guite, an Anglican poet, priest and professor, led a discussion of “Prayer,” a poem by 17th-century Welsh poet George Herbert. One line describes prayer as “the six-daies world-transposing in an houre,” bringing to mind how we seek to heal or at least offset the troubles of the week by spending an hour in prayer and worship at church on Sunday. Guite mused that perhaps that action should be turned outward – that just as a difficult piece of music can be transposed into a more sing-able key, what if we carried our prayers out of the church and into the world to transpose our muddy, difficult days into moments that are themselves sacred and holy?