Make This Place Beautiful

by Nathan Brasfield, Director of Youth and Community Ministries

About fifteen minutes before the start of Youth Formation this past Sunday morning, I was alone in the new High School room on the fourth floor, unwrapping a new ottoman that had been delivered. From the few pieces laid out on the floor, I assumed that the only steps needed to put it to proper use were to screw on the feet, place the cushion on top, and set it in front of the two couches in the corner of the room. 

By the time I removed all the plastic wrapping and followed these steps, Youth Ministries volunteer Bill Bangham had arrived. With such a simple assembly already nearly complete, I wondered out loud to him what the accompanying instruction manual I had tossed on the shelf next to me actually had to say about it. After flipping through a few pages of extremely simple (and basically unnecessary) instructions in very large type (with illustrations, too), I took special notice of the final step: “and arrange to make it beautiful.” After snickering at how cute this was with Bill—and having screwed on all the feet and placed the cushion on top—I said, “Ok, here I go …” and pushed the completed ottoman over to where it was spaced evenly within the L-shape formed by the two couches. “Did I do it?” I laughed. “Did I make it beautiful?”

In 2012, I first visited Calvary during the Lenten Preaching Series to see one of my favorite biblical scholars after seeing an ad in the newspaper. I was impressed then by the building’s almost tangibly storied beauty. I also had my very first taste of the breadth and depth of the kind of thoughtful, even sophisticated conversations Calvary hosts regularly. Now, over a decade later, and especially now that I am on staff in Community Ministries at Calvary, I continue to be struck by how this place—alluring and refined as it is—persists within the often messy and always unpredictable hustle and bustle of human beings in this downtown area of a city that has so much poverty and hardship that is not beautiful at all.

Maggie Smith reflects on this same tension as it exists in the world at large in her poem “Good Bones.” “The world is at least fifty percent terrible,” she writes. But, still, she tries to “sell” this same world to the children she has brought into it just as a realtor might try to sell a less-than-desirable house to a potential buyer by saying, “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.” 

If you go into the other room in the new Youth Ministries space on the fourth floor (i.e., the one without the new, beautifully placed ottoman), you’ll see paper jigsaw puzzles of sanctuaries taped on the wall, a LEGO version of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris that is gradually being pieced together, and cardboard boxes containing miniature interior scenes created with craft materials. Thanks to our Sunday morning volunteers, these are all part of an ongoing Sunday formation series for our middle schoolers on the importance of sacred spaces.

To work Smith’s idea of the side-by-side beauty and terribleness of this earth into a more theological idiom, we may pull from the poet Wendell Berry, who writes, “There are no unsacred places; // there are only sacred places // and desecrated places.” Calvary continues to be a sacred space in God’s world that persists against desecration. We welcome the presence of the holy and embrace the beautiful right where it is, here among us. Barbara Brown Taylor (who returns to the Lenten Preaching Series tomorrow) described Calvary the last time she was in our pulpit in 2023 as “one of the Holy Spirit’s favorite nests.” And, as she reminds the reader in her book An Altar in the World, “Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it” (xvii; emphasis mine).

Although in Smith’s poem “You could make this place beautiful” is a somber acknowledgment of the harsh reality of the world’s rough edges that also questions our ability or willingness to mitigate this roughness, it becomes for her an expression of hope when it forms the title of her later memoir in which she reflects so honestly on the joy that has come to her with and within her grief. This mingling of the messy and even the seemingly mundane with and within the holy is the kind of sacramental beauty of God’s world that is accessible in a special way here at Calvary.

So, when you say your prayers here or pass the peace, when you collect clothes for the Neighborhood Breakfast clothes closet or help host guests at Room in the Inn, when you make yourself available to people at the courthouse around the corner as one of the Friends of the Mental Health Court, when you support women formerly entrapped in human trafficking through Thistle and Bee, when you advocate for justice and peace in our city with MICAH, when you serve in the kitchen or in worship, when you clean, when you teach, when you welcome others who come in or near these doors, or when you simply put furniture in its place, in following these and countless other routine, mundane, or even messy steps—whether it’s plainly stated in the instruction manual or not—you make this place beautiful.