Temple + Market
Walking in Taiwan//Advent
The temple should be next to the marketplace. The thing about it is that if you’re going to make an offering at the temple, you need stuff to offer. Your stuff. That you bought. With your money. Or for trade. There’s a direct relationship between you and what you’re offering and the god you offer it to.
This changes everything. When you have to do it. When it’s not direct deposit. When it’s not a check in the plate.
When your body. Your work. Your effort is required, you become the connection between the marketplace and the temple. You’re a temporary resident of each place, crossing between them. Taking humble bits of this world to be converted into divine gifts.
There is so much lost when all we do is at a distance. Not just through screens, but with only the sacrifice of time or the dissociated giving of money. When we are involved — our bodies, our materials — I think we can be taken into the divine exchange more fully.
From more than one pulpit, we might hear that consumerism is what’s killing the holy. They’re not wrong. But I wonder if the solution I most often hear presented isn’t a little naive. As though we can put the holy over here in its own special room with its own special rules. This is not how the world works. It is messy. The divine sits next to — and uses fully — the material world. That world penetrates and permeates the divine so that the opposite might also be true. The temple has to sit in the marketplace.
Luke 21:1-4
He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury;
he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins.
He said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them
for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.” - NRSVUE
When the offering comes from what my hands have earned and carried across the street, the distance between the marketplace and the temple collapses. A kind of incarnation.
Note: this is the twenty-second in a series of Advent reflections on my summer 2025 pilgrimage to Taiwan. I’ll lean on photos from my trip to carry us, though you’ll find some short writing and some songs to guide you through the season. I hope you’ll consider making a contribution to Taiwan Episcopal Church (you may need to translate the webpage and will need to convert your contribution to New Taiwan Dollars).
A bit about me: I am a seminarian, teacher, and community builder rooted in the Episcopal tradition. After many years as a theatre professor and artistic leader, I am exploring how beauty, ritual, and relationship help people recover their humanity and their hope. Here on Controlled Burn, I write on formation, belonging, and the slow, never-ending work of becoming.