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What Thrift Stores, Ecclesiastes, and the First Law of Thermodynamics Have to Say about Community (01.24.10)
First Words, January 24, 2010
by Jessamyn Schnackenberg

Like everyone, it seems, who's come up here to talk about community, I am an introvert-more than that, really. But I felt like I had something I wanted to say about community, so here I am. And because I'm a poet, I think about things through poetry. So, I'd like to begin by sharing a poem with you.

Goodwill Thrift Store, Missoula (by Sheryl Noethe)

It's hard to hate anyone
when we're all maybe trying on
the shoes of the dead together,
trying on their slacks
and reading their books.
So we are gentle to each other
when we reach for the same
glass or blanket, smile when we collide
between the broken couch and a stain on the sheet.
We pass, cool ghosts who feel the sleeves
of jackets, the hems of dresses, and hold
nylon stockings up to the light.
An old man tries on a dead soldier's coat.
It weighs him down, he bends as though
he were carrying the man on his back.
When he opens his narrow pocketbook
a moth flies up.
We find blouses for our mothers
we never sent.
A past we never knew.
White bowls that fit inside each other.
Someone else's babies.
Painstakingly embroidered pillowcases.
Empty jars. Proof of happier lives.

When I pass the rack of dark wool suits
I smell a human musk, like an animal would.
I get the sense of a man, my long dead grandfather,
and I am filled with love for the suits, love
for the man holding the double boiler, love
for the teen-aged girl with bare feet, sucking
the ends of her hair and watching the clock,
love for the lonesome one whom the shoes
will surely fit.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that nothing can be created or destroyed. You've only to look around a thrift store to see that this is true. And, as I think this poem is telling me, that means the universe is like a giant thrift store.

Just like a thrift store, the universe-its inventories of energy and matter-is constantly changing, making its old new by being new to each of us. We recycle and pass on. We share and work on what we find.

And like the "finds" we make in the thrift store we are given God sightings. How can we not love what we find of God in others? Why do we fail to look for it in ourselves?

I've been going through a variety of fears and anxieties and doubts. At times I've felt like God created my suffering, and almost certainly blamed Him, without exactly saying so (because, of course, you're not supposed to say so).

Other times I've felt that God must somehow be responsible for destroying my suffering. You know, "God, please take this away." The God-as-cosmic-busboy scenario, maybe.

Obviously, I didn't understand my physics then. And I didn't understand God. And I still don't, but lately I think I'm getting closer.

I said that according to the First Law of Thermodynamics nothing can be created or destroyed. But that's not the whole law: It actually states that nothing can be created or destroyed, only transformed.

It's taking me a long time to realize that my suffering, anyone's suffering, is not created or destroyed by God-but it can be transformed by God. And, just like matter or energy, in order to be transformed, it has to interact with something. And today I'd like to call that something community.

Go back to that thrift store. We can turn those salad cruets into bud vases, that window box into a bookshelf. We can turn our suffering into a knowledge that others suffer. We can turn a chance meeting with another human being into another chance to find God.

We don't just have the opportunity to walk in another's shoes if we so choose. It's the thrift store universe-we are already wearing each other's shoes, reading each other's books, knowing each other's lives.

Everything is shared. What we borrow, what we give, what we pass on-what we share connects us. Community is that big.

In Ecclesiastes, we hear that "There is nothing new under the sun."

Thrift store again, right? And thank God. Because how could I possibly bear it if I thought that, upon encountering my suffering, God could only scratch his head and say, "Well I'll be-I didn't know we had any of this down here."

I am not news to God. None of us are. We are all well-loved and familiar and perhaps even "gently used." Second-hand in the sense that our lives, in addition to being our own, belong to each other and belong first to God.

If I feel shopworn, then I am misunderstanding the shop. I am forgetting what my life can teach me about the lives of others. Maybe we are each meant to be a "find" for someone else in the world.

So, I guess I'm saying that this is community: That others have worn these same shoes. That our lives, and our experiences, are all connected and gathered together. Like those thrift store bowls-we all fit inside each other.

Why not call that community?

Heck-why not call it Goodwill?