Clearing out the Worship Room

Anyone need a collection of six-year old Christingles?

We're clearing out the Worship Room again. A thing that needs to take place every so often. Now the Worship Room is quite badly named. It's not that any worship actually takes place there - except in that super-spiritual sense that all that we do is worship. Rather, it's where we prepare for worship. Where we store those items (candle holders, carol sheets, rams-horn trumpets) that we use on a more infrequent basis.

And where we shove the junk left over from acts of creative worship, in case someone can use it again.

The half-burnt tea lights we just accept as a matter of fact. No-one wants to waste a tea light with wax still in it. But then nobody wants to fiddle around trying to find the wick in a half-used one. So this morning once again we've melted all the wax down, and re-cast it as a life-sized candle in the shape of a celebrity. This year it's Silvio Berlusconi. We'll look forward to watching his diminishing stature through the Yuletide period.

Likewise pebbles. Now everybody likes a nice pebble to hold in worship. But where the people of Dunstable in the old days used to think that plum-pudding stone bred underground to produce new pebbles, I believe that every day, new pebbles are materialising in the drawers of the Worship Room from another dimension.

Then we have the whole "Old Service Sheets" phenomenon. Again, I understand people's innately frugal nature - and I appreciate that they don't want to waste the world's resources. And some service sheets could be re-used a year later, I suppose, no matter how dog-eared they become. - and whatever vile purposes the Under 8s seem to have used them for. But the "Liturgy for the 50th Birthday of Tony Blair" is unlikely ever to be re-used, and there hundreds of service sheets that are like unto it.

Then we have the bags of left-over hazelnuts. Bought every year to celebrate Julian of Norwich's Day. And made even less appetising, now we have them in front of us here, by the fact that we celebrate Julian in May - when the only way that you can go gathering nuts is to get the de-shelled varieties, from Waitrose. We've piled them up in the Top Meadow, next to the aforesaid Christingles (and the hard-boiled Easter eggs, and about 500 feet of dried-up vine branches) and we're awaiting advice from Environmental Health.

So now we're down to the weird stuff, and trying to remember why. What good was the model of the Mary Rose in matchsticks? What devotional purpose did the small signed photographs of Frankie Howerd ever serve? If we ground up all the sea shells we've accumulated and threw them in the sea, could it combat CO2-induced carbonification? Who thought there was any point in collecting up all the used party-poppers last Yule, and putting them neatly in a cardboard box? What good did they imagine they'd be for?

And so it continues. A stuffed hedgehog, forsooth (and it takes a lot to make me say "forsooth" these days). 44 copies of Mission Praise 2 (words only). A letter from Bob Geldof, telling us what we could do with all the PET bottle tops we sent him. Baked-bean scented candles. Baked-bean-can candle-holders (we suspect these last two went together, but can't remember why). A tea-pot shaped like a cottage.

It's like the spiritual detritus of our worshipping lives, washed up on the beach of old liturgies. Ah well, it's all gotta go. The skip has been loaded and the truck is here. Wagons, roll!