Day 43. A Temple or a Mall?

*If that chameleon were me,*
*I’d be ashamed to sham*
*Each night, all white between the sheets,*
*I’d wonder who I am.*
Flanders and Swann, The Chameleon

“Think like a temple.” That’s what St. Paul says to his church in Corinth (1 Cor. 6:19), and that’s what we’ll be examining in a few days. For most of my life, however, I lived more like a mall. Temples are simple, centralized, compact. Malls sprawl.

I suppose it’s the way of life I learned as I grew up in a pluralistic society. Like everyone else, I yearned for companionship and intimacy with others. Since nobody’s way of living was deemed any better or worse than any other way (all belief-systems are created equal in the modern melting pot), I developed a series of separate chambers, rooms, “shops” if you will, to accommodate a wide variety of personalities, worldviews and relationships. The best image I can think of to describe this way of living is a mall.

Malls are designed to appeal to everybody. There’s something to be found in a mall for all tastes and styles. Each shop is a self-contained world with its own “look”, its own background music, and its own distinct environment. Once you enter one of these shops, you can forget the larger mall of which it is only a single cell.

My relationships, especially in high school and college, were a series of separate compartments. In each relational compartment, I accommodated myself to the tastes of the person or group that occupied that part of my heart. So with the serious, studious friends, I played that part. With the partying, carefree friends, I was the same. With the artsy types I was artsy; with the churchy types, I was churchy. I became a social chameleon, adapting myself to whatever micro-culture of friends I found myself in.

As I think back, one clue to my compartmentalized state was my wildly varying tastes in music. I listened to anything and everything. Music was a social identifier. So I made sure I could identify with the widest possible variety of styles and tastes. It worked. I had lots of friends. But I still craved intimacy. I still felt lonely and isolated. I slowly discovered that the mall approach to relationships wasn’t working.

Where was God in all this? God was certainly part of my life during this time, but he was only in one compartment. I comforted myself with the thought that he occupied the largest compartment – the big-name department store, if you will – in my sprawling mall of relationships. The problem was that there were whole sections of the rest of the mall where God was not permitted. I hid my relationship with God from many of my friends – for fear that they would reject me if they knew me as a Christian. I was deeply afraid of rejection because I knew I needed the sense of intimacy and belonging my friends provided.

Through prayer and reading scripture, I realized that God was challenging me to reorganize my relationships. It was no longer acceptable to quarantine my faith from certain friends. I couldn’t justify mumbling my own moral convictions while those around me shouted theirs in defiance of the gospel. But how should I begin to rearrange these relationships? How was I to become a temple and stop being a mall?

Everything in a temple is organized around God. The Lord is always at the center. Malls, as I said, offer a multitude of compartments – separate worlds in which a wide variety of tastes and personalities can find a niche. A temple has only one purpose: to glorify God. Those who enter a temple should sense immediately that there is something different about this structure; it is not like any other building. They may not at first be able to describe the difference, but they should sense it all the same.

So I began by eliminating from my social activities anything that I knew was offensive to God. Since many of these were things I did with my friends, the difference was noticed right away. My friends thought that I was rejecting them, judging them, turning my back on them. They, for the most part, wrote me off as a religious fanatic. They stopped calling; stopped inviting me to their parties. Though I had been most afraid of being mocked or challenged, I was not prepared for the most painful persecution of all. I was simply isolated and ignored.

Not by all, though. And these, I discovered, were true friends.

Is your life identifiably Christian or a melting pot of contradictory behavior? Have you made an art of blending in? Do you live the gospel despite the negative reactions you get from others or do you conform to the ideas, opinions, and trends of the popular culture? Are you a temple or a mall?

One way to recognize whether your relationships have become compartmentalized is to do this mental exercise. First, imagine that you are walking along with a leader from one of your groups of friends and you bump into a leader from another group of friends. Start with the most opposite groups. How do you imagine you would feel introducing them? If your life is consistent, well-integrated and centered on Christ, then there should be little discomfort on your part. But if you are a mall, and your relationships have become compartmentalized, you will be very uncomfortable when people from different parts of your mall cross paths.

So we are temples, not malls. Yet we must admit that we know very little about the temple of the Bible. Our first goal, then, in this part of the Novena, will be an instruction on the temple – its history (briefly), its purpose, its design and especially its relevance to our daily lives. If we’re going to restructure our relationships based on the temple, we need to know much more about this great and glorious sanctuary. Open your mind and heart now to the Word of God. I think you’ll find this very interesting.

Make it My Own

Daily Discernment Workbook

BRAIN STORM

1. Search Your Scroll

Scroll through the names on your cell phone or e-mail address list. In your journal (or below) group them by major categories: School friends, back home friends, family, church connections, work friends, etc. Use the Mall Layout below and place those large categories in the big department store spots (A. B. C…). Oh, and set apart your “fun friends” group for G. That’s the group you’d spend every Friday night with if you had the choice.

Now subdivide these groups. What are the groups within those groups? Use the numbered compartments to list those. There may be quite a lot!

Think about it…

Put an “X” next to the groups/subgroups where you wouldn’t feel comfortable talking openly about your relationship with God. Is God even welcome in this part of your Mall of Relationships? How do you think he feels about this? Talk to him about it.

PONDER IT A BIT

2. Schitzophonic Tastes

Most of the people around my age don’t like just one type of music. In fact they generally like “everything but…” Am I like this? When I think about the music I listen to, I would say I like everything but…

[ ] Rap/Hip-hop

[ ] Country

[ ] Classical

[ ] Reggae/Ska

[ ] Soul/Soft jazz

[ ] Jazz in general (I know I’m supposed to like it, but I’ve got to be honest)

[ ] 80’s music

[ ] 90’s music

[ ] EDM

[ ] Classic Rock

Other:

In my opinion, is this true? Do most of my friends like a wide range of music? Why do I think this is (or is not) the case?

[0] lead quote - The Chameleon, The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann, Track 3, music by Donald Swann, lyrics by Michael Flanders 1963

Novena Prayer

Make it My Own

Day 42. Building a Culture of Life

Day 44. Think Like a Temple