“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”
JM Barrie, Peter Pan
On any given Sunday, you can usually find me standing in front of a sanctuary leading worship. Sometimes it is robed, sometimes not. Sometimes I am fully awake and some mornings I just as sleepy as half the congregation. Some mornings I feel the hymns and other mornings I wonder what was I thinking picking this for us to sing...but there I'm looking out on pews that could have more people sitting in them and a congregation that is turning grey faster then the church wants to admit. And this is pretty much the norm across our denomination and the mainline churches. We ask WHY? but we know the answer: the church isn't relevant in people's lives today. And so we sit, awaiting for people to have that moment when they want to church again.
In a recent watching of Peter Pan with my daughter I was reminded not only of the huge Christian undertones in Disney movies but was struck by the scene in which they kids - Wendy and her brothers - learn to fly. At first Peter tells them to "think of a wonderful thought" "any wonderful thought" but after a few failed attempts Peter realizes they need pixie dust.
Faith and hope - trust and belief - God: all of these require us to take a leap because they are unseen and in some ways unknown. All of them take a different level of understanding for there isn't tangible proof. And in a world where we need proof; where we want to do an experiment, God can seem like a fantasy.
But Peter Pan has the right idea - Pixie Dust. Pixie Dust lets them fly - a placebo often cures people by thinking they are getting the real thing. Without Pixie Dust the kids couldn't fly - and without sacraments (communion and baptism) - without the tangible part of our faith allowing the Spiritual to come through and be felt then the relevance of our faith begins to lose its grip. You see we need those Spiritual moments for our faith to take flight and for our trust to find hope.
