I lingered over lines about “the theology of small things” nestled in a biography, Simple Gifts, of Pat and Patty Crowley.
The Crowleys were lay Catholics who opened their Wilmette, Illinois home to students and refugees and who co-founded the loftily titled Christian Family Movement in the late 1940s as a framework for conversations and social action between and among married couples. The Crowleys were also among the founders of the organization I direct, Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly, or H.O.M.E., a nonprofit whose Pat Crowley House in Chicago is an intentional intergenerational home to a dozen seniors, a handful of young adults, and a family with a pre-schooler.
I pulled the book from the office because I wanted to learn more about what was behind this organization that had just hired me as its director. The author John Kotre mentions a friend of the Crowleys, someone named Bert Terpstra, saying that this theology of small things concerns itself with “problems which touch everyone in daily living” as opposed to “huge abstract problems.”
Other than a 71-page set of reflections on the Gospels entitled The Theology of Small Things by Martyn Kelly, a Quaker from Great Britain, I could find nothing on the internet about such a theology.
So I have decided to share my own interpretations.
In the way that poet William Carlos Williams wrote that “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow,” to me, so much depends upon each human being’s ability to walk in the moccasins of another, to empathize, and to draw from that well of empathy a way of living. It has to start with the small things.
“Small” evokes for me feelings of coziness, the strength of an atom, the vulnerability of an infant, manageability, the tug at a skirt hem, invisibility. I think of Rabbi Robert Marx and his frequent evocation in his sermons of the “still, small voice” within, the voice of God, the voice that too often we do not hear or do not understand.
To think of the theology of small things is to think about the present moment. It is to hear the birds right now, the hum of cars right now, each breath, right now.
It is to see that greatness does not have to transcend the individual but can be the individual. Sometimes, the whole really is the sum of its parts. The outstretched hand from one human being to another living being is enough. To save a life is to save a world.
