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Boxes, boxes
By the time you read this, the memory, thankfully, will have faded into the past, but at the moment they are everywhere. Big ones, small ones, tall ones, squat ones. Mountains of them, stacked five high. I’m surrounded by them; hemmed in by them. I can only move by wading through them, clambering over them, grappling to shift them out of the way. Boxes. Can’t move for them. Can’t move without them.
And because we moved into the vicarage only two days ago (as I write), you will be able to picture the scene of cardboard carnage in every room, as boxes begin to be opened and empty ones flattened.
Seeing all these boxes, I was struck by just how good we are at packaging. If there was an Olympic event for boxing things up, we would be gold medallists. If you want first-hand experience of the art of packaging at the pinnacle of what is humanly possible, you need only go to that centre of flat-pack excellence a couple of junctions along the M62. I recently had to go four times in one week—that’s four years’ worth of visits! But it is certainly an impressive operation that takes boxing things up to a remarkable level.
So what is it about boxes? There’s a great appeal about them because they are so practical and neat. With their clean lines and regular shapes they snuggle up to one another very easily. You can dump any old rubbish in them and in an instant, order is restored. Boxes are also rather exciting because you never know what you are going to find inside them.
But I wonder whether we should also be rather wary of boxes. With boxes, everything is so … contained. Too processed, too managed. And some things will never fit into a box, however hard we try to stuff them in.
There is a box at the heart of Christian belief. It was made of stone rather than cardboard, and it was designed to contain a dead body, which it did … for a short while. But no box on earth could hold the life which God gives and Jesus burst out of his tomb, the first to inhabit life outside the box.
I find I still try to put God in a box. You probably do too. But he has a history of being uncontainable and won’t be, can’t be taped down so that we can shove him in a corner and pile things on top of him. And the more I discover about the unboxed life that Jesus lived and the way he liberated those he met from the boxes that they had been stuffed into, the more I want to know how to follow him better. If it is a choice between life with boxes and life without them, I know which way I would jump every time.
How about you?
Ian Rumsey, Vicar of Bowdon
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