Containers

Containers have come up frequently in my social circulation recently. My minister at church speaks of containers everytime he does a service. He says that those doing the worship service create a container that holds the congregants in what we hope is an hour of spiritual reflection, growth, or transformation. Thus the preacher, the musician, and the worship associate are all charged with being present in a very particular and intentional way.

In the case of a religious service at our UU church, a container holds and bounds very sensitive modes of human being. The container of the service is created by the shut doors of the room, the tone of voice in which the sermon is delivered, the meaning of those words, the shape of the musical selections among other issues. In a way, the container we create is deep placemaking that not only considers the material presence of the building and the people therein, but also the spiritual presence of the parishioners. Perhaps more pointedly, the container we create is the spiritual analog for the physical plant of the church. The building holds bodies and the container of the service holds the spirit there with the bodies.

I suppose this thesis begs the question of mind-body dualism. I am not sure what to do with that. I think of it in Mahayana terms: two levels of truth. The conventional truth of the situation is that there are drastically different ways of being, two of which are mentally and physically. Ultimately, they are of one taste, so to speak.

Anyway, containers: they are everywhere and they serve to ground, bound, focus, embody, and imprison the world of spirit. They are a fact of human, embodied life and we are stuck with them, as painful and cumbersome as they may be.

The other moment at which the notion of containers inserted itself into my life was during a conversation with my yoga teacher. This mention was more concerned with an individual's, my individual, presence as a spiritual practitioner. I will come back to that later.

Peace,