Just as favorite tchotchkes, designer clothes and heirloom china lose all value once placed on the driveway for the yard sale, Biblical verses, hand-painted on the screaming purple, blue, yellow, green and red truck hitched behind the purple, blue, yellow, green and red former school bus, seem reduced too far. If Jesus really loved me, wouldn’t He send the message on something a bit more pleasing to my eye? Would God’s mercy really depend on whether I saw this multicolored monstrosity parked behind the Jack-in-the-Box, slowed down sufficiently to read all the verses crammed onto the doors, side panels, windows (which is a bit scary, thinking of God’s chosen person driving around unable to see out the windows except through the tiny pinpricks of light that make their way around the large lettering), plywood boards held aloft by – by what? God’s will? Duct tape? Crazy glue?
We live in the land of the unholy. Nothing is sacred. The Bible often regarded with scorn. Church attendance is seen as radical, “conservative” in our post-deconstructionist, post-liberal democracy, leaning like Pisa’s tower, threatening to topple at any moment into what the next generation will no doubt call post-democracy. How radical is it to seek answers? To ponder questions that a google search won’t answer?
Some find their church in the snippets of woods and meadows developers can’t yet buy. Some find their church in the seas. Some find their church at gatherings held at the steps of Twelve. Some find their church in the ritual of putting young ones to sleep each night with a song or story. Some find it in movies or music. Some even find it in the spaces where poetry is read aloud. You can take the people out of the church, and maybe the church out of the people, but you can’t take away the yearning for things to make sense, the need to belong to something larger than the handful of people we live with, the need to look up into the sky, when the tiny bits of light make their way through the leaves of the trees, and wonder if we are seeing something larger.
Nothing has true value – value is what the consumer is willing to pay. One dollar for that spaghetti-strap black slip dress I paid $200 for – yup, that’s what it’s worth now. What’s the value of hand-painted Bible verses screaming from a monstrous purple, blue, yellow, green and red bus into the street, waiting for someone to read them, hear them, awaken them?
What does it mean that I toss out my inner treasures, throw them haphazardly on the ground and wait for others to make a bid? Who will see beneath my garish paint, hear my outlandish messages that block anything coming through my windows? Whose light will dapple through to that tiny place inside?