Lately I’ve been thinking about some of the contrasts that chase us through life at Emmanuel. They start on Sunday when I walk over the small round disk embossed BOSTON GROUNDWATER TRUST, which is set into the sidewalk in front of the church. It’s one of 800 wells monitoring the groundwater that still covers the 200,000 Maine spruce-tree trunks that were steam-pile driven-in 160 years ago to keep our feet out of the soup below. Sure, I know that part of the motivation for filling the Back Bay was to keep prosperous white Protestants from decamping to the suburbs, and my Irish great-grandfather south of the tracks. But still, there’s no way to get into Emmanuel without at least an unthinking pilgrimage over that magical, invisible, upside-down forest.

And then there’s our signature Emmanuel’s Land Window. For all its beauty, when it was installed in 1899, it must have recalled for many parishioners their (or their parents’) past escape from the harsh, narrow Calvinism that had long used John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as a guidebook to escaping God’s righteous anger. Yet our forebears somehow found it in them to save the good even from that narrow outlook and to integrate Pilgrim with the generous Gospel they found at Emmanuel.

And finally, of course, I wait on Bach. He never got the salary or the respect he was entitled to, and he lost his first wife and 11 of his 20 children too early. How did he ever pick up the pieces? Yet we listen to his music hungrily, and when he pairs an alto with an oboe, I know it is possible after all to live securely in the palm of God’s hand.

So I’m learning to love the contrasts that make up our life together. Over these next few weeks of stewardship, celebrate them and toss in your widow’s mite of talent and time and treasure.

Commit what you can, and then perhaps a bit more.

–Mike Shea