WINTER SHELTER [T, 1-7-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Preacher—WINTER SHELTER [T, 1-7-25]

 

There was a time when preachers always lived next door to the church building. That’s where the parsonage was. We didn’t always live in a next-door parsonage, but when we did, in winter I would slip over to the church building after dark to unlock the doors. If I lived next door to a church right now, I would have gone over there last night, as soon as it was dark, and unlocked the doors, because here we have ten inches of snow and single digit temps.

I didn’t tell anyone, of course, that I unlocked the doors. I went over first thing the next morning and relocked them.

There was a time, even when I first started preaching, that church buildings were always left unlocked. When our daughters were babies, and we traveled long distances to take them to see grandparents at Christmas, we would stop at church buildings to heat up bottles, change diapers, use the bathroom. No one saw. No one cared. Church buildings belonged to anyone who needed one.

But times changed. Teens went in to make out. Drunks went in to sleep it off. Church buildings were no longer community help centers. Holy people would come in the morning and find unholy things on the floors. So, church buildings needed to be kept locked to keep the unholy stuff out. Yes, church buildings should be sanctuaries if needy people came to them for shelter, but they couldn’t be kept clean that way. And didn’t holy people have a right to a holy building?

Janitors believe church buildings exist to be kept clean. The best way to do that is never to use them, for anything. Trustees believe they exist to be maintained. Religious people believe they exist to be kept holy. No one believes they exist so that homeless people or runaway kids or drug addicts or drunks can get out of the winter cold. But sometimes a drunk or a run-away teen tries a church door in desperation, and if I had secretly unlocked that door, they would find a place to shelter for the night.

Winter is a time when people go outside to get away from what is inside and are then afraid to go back. They need some sanctuary from the cold, but they cannot go home again. I left the doors unlocked for those people, sometimes old, often young.

Winter is a hard time to be indoors if you are young.

One night, two boys, young teens, knocked frantically on the door of our house. It was dark outside. The temperature was ten degrees below zero. They had run two blocks in stocking feet and t-shirts to escape from the violence in their house to the safety in our house. They weren’t part of our church, but they knew who we were. They thought they could find shelter with us. They didn’t know that I had unlocked the doors of the church building, so that they could go there. So that I would not be bothered by needy people coming to my own home.

I had thought that I unlocked the doors of the church building so that people could go there, in the dark, with their winter fears, to escape the winter fright in their homes. I had not understood, until those boys stood huddling inside our front door, in the warmth of our house, that I had opened the church building to them so I would not have to open the Church to them, my own home, my own heart.

John Robert McFarland

“We are always moving toward mystery. So we are much closer to what is real if we cannot see our destination too clearly.” Rachel Naomi Remen