Church Mice
A friend gave us these two church mice this week. As you can see, one of them is praying while the other one is reading (possibly a Bible, but who knows?). We had fun deciding which one is which. You can decide for yourself.
But it also gave us a chance to reflect on why we called this blog 2 church mice. When we first started it, another blogger described it as ‘twee’ which Webster’s dictionary defines as ‘dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint’, though we suspect that the person who said that was probably working on a different definition. Still, if that’s the worst thing anyone says about us we can live with it. It’s certainly better than being defined by some of the less attractive qualities of mice, which can be dirty things, making a mess and creating a nuisance – though we’ve probably done a bit of that in our time.
If truth be told, we were probably inspired by a throwback to the sort of pictures of mice you find in the writings of Beatrix Potter. Lovable characters, who you would almost want to cuddle up to on a cold night. The sort also described in Robert Burns’s famous poem, To a Mouse, which starts with the line ‘Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie’. That certainly describes us pretty well. We have never found it easy to know how to deal with the sort of aggressive people who seem all too often to be found in churches, and our natural tendency in the face of argument and complaint is just to sneak back into the mousehole until the noise has died down. That can be an advantage (it has saved us from saying things many things that we might have regretted later), but it can also work against you as other people often take advantage. Still, that is who we are – temperamentally shy, believe it or not (both of us), and certainly with no capacity to project ourselves onto centre stage as being God’s gift.
Mice operate on the edges, and that is definitely us, generally preferring to be beneath the radar, happy with our own company, though enjoying wider community when it is open and nurturing.
As well as getting the mice statues, we’ve been talking a lot about this in relation to another project we’re working on right now: an A-Z of church life. We’ll probably be a bit challenged by the time we get to the end of the alphabet, but we decided early on that A could only stand for one thing: attitude. We’ve come across more than our fair share of angry people this last week or two, all of them church leaders. Attitude is surely going to determine so much, from how we do our theology, to whether we can ever be effective in mission (for who, in the midst of an angry world, would want to sign up with yet more angry people?). Church people sometimes justify aggression by appealing to the story about Jesus throwing money changers out of the temple – without realizing that the only people Jesus ever got really angry with were self-opinionated religious leaders who spent their lives putting other people right!
