Reflection on Brass

I have been thinking about brass, that alloy of copper and zinc that is used to make shiny things for decoration and musical instruments. Churches loved Brass because it was a relatively cheap material- cheaper than gold or silver- that looked bright and could signify to visitors that a church cared about how it looked. The church in which I work has relatively little brass because so many of the people who moved down to the Outer Banks had gotten tired of the endless polishing of brass and silver in their previous churches and were not about to start the whole process of being owned by "STUFF" anymore.

I remeber a church I worked in where the ladies of the Altar Guild would work hours on taking care of Brass railings. In the old days women wore gloves to go to church but as styles changed the "younger" women would dare to come up to the brass altar rail and put their hands on it to kneel-- and that says noting about the whole idea of children with their dirty and sticky little swinging on the rail. Oh, the daggers that would flash out of the eyes of the guardians of Brass, the Altar Guild, as they they saw their hours of labor to get God's house just right, be destroyed and they would have to spend more time between the services fixing it back up!

The older women got older and the younger women who now seemed, more and more, to have demanding jobs outside the home and had only so much energy for church work that Brass polishing moved very far down their agendas. Churches started putting the brass to the side and as some churches closed some of the brass went to antique stores and yard sales.

On our last trip to the west, Pat and I stopped in Asheville for a couple days to break up the trip. Close to the art district was a field in which people were selling all sorts of wares. One woman was selling dresses and using a brass banner stand as a clothes hanger. There was nothing shiny about this stand for it was covered in years of tarnish. Pat decided that she needed to have and we bought it for a small price  and brought it home.

There it sat in our garage until yesterday when Pat started to work on getting the tarnish off. She asked me to work on it when I got home. So I did. After about an hour of work it got as good as it was going to look. But something had come over me-I was at peace. One of the problems with being a Priest is that there is always more than a bunch of things still unfinished but this job -had a beginning, middle and end  AND I could see results. It was mindless work on a vanity and yetI found it centering. I found myself in a whole line of Altar guilds throughout the ages working on things that were blessed. The simple repetitive hand movements of getting the tarnish off and letting the brass shine through became a prayer- an icon of my own need to get rid of the tarnish of my soul.

The irony is that this banner stand probably had never been officially blessed- it had probably been in a Protestant church that did not believe in blessing things. Yet it had been blessed by the sweat of people working to make something beautiful for the Lord. Blessings are not the peculiar property of Priests, all people are involved in blessing each day.

This stand will probably not be used in church again-- I am not all that sure that the Altar Guild would welcome a gift that needed this much regular work but it will be used at the churches Holly Days Christmas Bazaar as a display for the used jewelry booth, where people have donated old costume jewelry which Pat and others have cleaned up and will sell to raise money for outreach.  Something that once was loved and fallen into neglect, is renewed and used again as a gift to be loved again. Not a bad metaphor for the church; a community where what once was old is renewed, born again, to bring love in order to make the world a better place.