Shopping with Jesus

Shopping as a Spiritual Exercise.

All the way down at the end of the plumbing aisle at Lowe’s I found what I was looking for–a four-foot-long galvanized pipe with a red handle on the top. It’s an amazing device called a yard hydrant. Even when the ground is frozen solid and the air temperature is 10 degrees it provides water. It’s almost miraculous.

I installed the hydrant in our back pasture, and sure enough, even in the middle of winter, when I walk out there and lift the handle, water pours out.

Every time I go into Lowe’s or Home Depot, I marvel at all the stuff available. Yard hydrants. Light fixtures. Lumber. Pipes. Bags of concrete. Then I come to the tool section. Wow! A whole wall of drill bits, saw blades, screw drivers, pliers, levels, tape measures, wrenches, chisels, hammers–sometimes I just stand there and stare, my mind spinning with admiration and desire.

Shopping.

What does shopping have to do with God? With godliness? How can buying a yard hydrant become a spiritual exercise?

It’s possible to pick up a yard hydrant, carry it to the check out, pay my money and walk out of the store with nothing more than a piece of hardware. It’s also possible to turn my purchase into an experience of communion, of conscious participation in a global network of thousands of people.

The creation of that hydrant requires the collaboration of miners, mill workers, designers, engineers, accountants just to complete the initial processes converting iron ore into the galvanized pipe, stainless steel rods and cast iron used for various parts of the hydrant. There are similar chains of people who create the brass used for the valve base and the ethylene propylene used for the plunger. Finally the hydrant is assembled (probably in China) and shipped. Shipping in this case probably means transportation by rail, boat and truck. The entire process is tied together by a communication network of wires and satellites and people.

These thousands, or more likely tens of thousands, of people all worked together so I could shop for a hydrant to provide water for my horses. And the forty-five dollars I pay for the hydrant plays a role in putting a dress on a five-year-old girl in China and in paying for the violin played by the son of the truck driver who hauled the container from the Port of Tacoma to Lowe’s in Federal Way.

The foundry worker in China and the truck driver here in Washington both invested a portion of their life in serving me. When I make my purchase, I am honoring their service. I am participating with them in a global communion. As I make my purchase I breath a prayer of blessing on the many hands and minds that are united in my simple act of buying a hydrant. And shopping becomes a verily communion as when I eat bread and drink grape juice at church.


(The more aware I become of the connection of my purchase to real, live people, the more likely I am to ask questions about the global economic system. It is not just “a system.” It is a network of people. The well-being of all those people matters at least as much as my own convenience.)

In addition to the experience of communion, there is also a sermon waiting for my attention in the purchase of that yard hydrant.

I go to the store. I buy a relatively cheap piece of hardware. I take it home and install it a thousand feet from the house. It’s fairly easy to be aware of my work, my personal effort in the process of installing that hydrant. I can tell you the hours I spent, the money I spent.

It takes more deliberate attention to appreciate how much truth that my plumbing work is entirely dependent on the prior work of others–on the tens of thousands of people I mentioned earlier.

It’s the same with spiritual life. It is easy to aware of our practices of Bible study and prayer. We can measure the hours and dollars we have invested in church life. We can count the devotional and theological books we have read and the seminars we have attended. We know about our effort to cultivate spiritual life.

The reality is that all of our spiritual life–ALL OF IT–is utterly dependent on the work of others. There would be no Bible to read apart from the thousands of anonymous monks who sat in cold dark monasteries copying manuscripts. There would be no English Bible apart from the scholars who specialized in exotic, ancient languages and passed their knowledge along from generation to generation. There would be no church to attend or devotional books to read if it weren’t for the Christian community over the centuries that has been the absolutely essential soil for the growth of preachers, mystics, composers, artists, writers, theologians, missionaries, dissidents, reformers, visionaries, prophets and even hermits.

My personal, individual spiritual life is possible only because it was preceded and is surrounded by a global network of humans. God alone is not enough. The Bible alone is not enough. Spiritual life is a function of a human network–i.e. church. (Just to be clear, the Roman Catholic claim to be the only authentic embodiment the Christian community over time is just as laughable as the contemporary notion that authentic Christianity can be my own personal, individual creation.) Church (the community of believers across geography and chronology) is one of the absolutely necessary conditions for the Bible or the Holy Spirit to be effective in the cultivation of Christian spirituality. Just as the global economic network is the absolutely necessary precursor to my installation of a hydrant in my back pasture.

So I go to the store for plumbing supplies. I buy a hydrant and in the process take part in communion and hear a fine sermon. Not a bad deal.