This week, as Matt and I have made our way across the country to attend my younger brother's wedding in West Virginia, I have been finding myself saying little prayers of gratitude for how mixed up our life has become. There used to be a time when I wished for homogeneity, that I might be like everybody else, that my family would fit comfortably into some generic cookie cutter. There are times when I have brought that same longing for conformity to the church, "if only our whatever, was like their whatever". Typing this out I feel silly --- and whisper that prayer of gratitude a bit more loudly, "thank you for making us just the way we are, thank you for this life, and these parents, this family, and this husband and this amazing church and community to serve in San Francisco." Maybe I've just gotten tired of trying to smooth over all the rough edges, or perhaps there's just no way to make all the puzzle pieces fit, perhaps there's more than one puzzle scattered on the dining table of life...

My brother and I were raised in an Episcopal family, though my Mom was raised by a not-always-orthodox Mennonite, my brother in college became a Mennonite, then went off to a United Church of Christ seminary and is now serving four Methodist churches in rural WV. Mom now attends a fairly progressive Catholic church. At the wedding there will be secular Jews, Wiccans, an Uncle who is a retired Presbyterian minister and loads of devotedly "spiritual but not religious" folks. My hunch is our family is like most families in the United States today --- we may even have a few fundamentalists here and there too.  

A book I have been reading along the journey is called Christianity After Religion by Diana Butler Bass and she describes this phenomenon, this mixing things up as bricolage, and shows that there's been lots of mixing even at the roots of our faith,

"...when Christianity was forming, it posed a challenge to both Roman imperial religion and Judaism --- the religions from which most of the early Christians came. The new adherents found the old ways moribund, somehow lacking the energy and inspiration to meet the challenges of the world around them. Yet they did not reject the old completely. Instead, the early Christians wove together their new way of life and the new stories of Jesus with practices they borrowed from other religions. In the process, they filled old practices with new meanings. Early churches were Christianized versions of ancient synagogues and built to resemble Roman basilicas; Easter borrowed elements from both Passover and pagan rites of spring; Christian theologians worked with Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy. When ancient believers wed these elements to Jesus's teaching, they actually stitched a new religion --- Christianity --- a form of faith, belief, and practice that spoke to the needs of their own souls and the world with great insight and spiritual vitality." 

Butler Bass continues, "The French have a word for this process of mixing practices: bricolage. The word means "to fiddle with or tinker with" or "to make creative use of whatever is at hand." In English, bricolage is often translated "do it yourself." In the West, as religious institutions are struggling, people are engaging in spiritual bricolage; they are "doing it themselves," as they pick up fragments of practice from various sources at hand and construct new sorts of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions."  

One of the fun sayings we have used to describe our life and work at St. Cyprian's is "nearly 90 years of mixing things up." As a congregation we have struggled with how we fit into the larger whole, we have at times been pushed out of the mainstream and at other times chosen to stand apart. Bricolage has been part of our history and in our contemporary earnest pursuit of new life, relationship and vitality we are together making creative use of whatever is at hand.  

See you soon at Turk & Lyon!