Healing the Lot

As I cleared the parking lot on Sunday in the A.M. of cigarette butts, I contemplated trash. Like who throws it, who picks it up. What the role of the Church should be in picking up the trash in society. And it is not just physical trash, but ideological trash. Worldviews that should best be discarded, and the wreckage that ensues because of false premises. I always get frustrated and even angry when mere men criticize the faith because of the trash pile of thought and action they sit on like a throne. Acting the king when quite the beggar. Throwing garbage.

The Parking Lot Movie/documentary is a thoughtful piece of work. Although the topic is not trash, it is about the dynamics of parking lots as a sociological phenomenon. Parking lots are a lot more complex than I gave them credit for...class warfare, labor, privilege, existential boredom, the mobile society. How many layers are in the lot like an onion?

While I was picking up the trash on Sunday, there was a church close by. Parishioners were heading in and out and several of them were using the parking lot I was cleaning. I know I looked the vagrant. I wondered what  they though of me. I looked purposeful but why? Who picks up trash on Sundays in a parking lot? A wacko, that is who.  

I justified my work in the lot on the Sabbath because in a sense I was healing the lot. Restoring order and cleanliness. I also treated finding the cigarette butts like finding Easter Eggs. If you want to make something less onerous, make a game out of it.

Play is another deep topic...how important it is that our work contain a play element. I heard a lecture one time on play and walked in with a somewhat dismissive attitude about the supposed profundity of play by a mentor of a friend of mine (who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania under the lecturer's tutelage). I walked out humbled. I got spanked intellectually by a man who knew far more about what makes life animated than I did.

That is another question the Church should be asking...can we not have fun and play while serving? Why is helping others perceived as such a serious endeavor...maybe even a downer? We know we need to do it but were are not exactly joyful about it. Just some thoughts.