Thursday, September 23, 2010

[worship] the macaroni metaphor

I'm working on a new project to be posted at this blog, and I suspect I will refer to this image a lot, so I wanted to give it a special post. I also, of course, hope that everyone in the field will adopt this model for theologies of liturgy, but that's a different issue.

The Kingdom of God is like this: in Sunday school, when I was young, we made Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day presents for our parents. For our mothers, we made jewelry boxes, for our fathers, paperweights. The medium was the same, though. We took an object (jewelry box, rock), glued macaroni to it, and spray-painted the whole project gold. Our parents (I imagine and can only hope) loved those projects, not because our parents lacked any basic aesthetic sense, but because we were our parents' children, and they loved us, and they knew we had spent time and love to make this gift that was, therefore, infinitely precious.

Our worship is like that. And it is exceedingly pleasing to our Divine Parent.

2 comments:

  1. That's it exactly! It's an excellent metaphor.

    I also appreciate the way you structure it like a parable, with the "The Kingdom is like this" intro.

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  2. Let anyone who has ears to hear, listen!

    ... she said, trying to think of a more inclusive but equally robust closing for a parable.

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