Some years ago, Ben and I used to watch Project Runway together.  Or, perhaps it would be truer to say that I used to watch Project Runway and Ben used to watch it with me.   The set-up for the reality t.v. program is simple: a number of fashion designers are thrown together and charged with completing design challenges for each episode.  One by one, the judges eliminate a contestant after each challenge until one final designer remains as champion.  Some of the challenges were really interesting and some were just bizarre.[i]  The best were the “unconventional materials” challenges, where instead of going to the fabric store for their design elements, the contestants had to put together a garment using something else entirely: trash from the local dump, bits of nature they picked up on a hike, products from the office supply store or the candy store or the bookshop. 

I loved watching the designers figure out how to make something out of these unconventional materials.  And in the midst of it all was their celebrity mentor, the fabulous Tim Gunn, who would walk around the designers’ tables offering criticism and feedback as their designs came together.  Tim Gunn’s now-famous tag-line was “Make it work!”  When he came across a designer whose process was just not going right – The dress is too short! That fabric is too garish! Your model looks like a Picasso painting on acid (and not in a good way)! – Tim Gunn would offer a few suggestions on how to right the ship and then tell the designer, “You’ve got to find a way to make it work!”

I was reminded of Project Runway and Tim Gunn’s tag-line the other day in conversation with the seminarian who serves so willingly at Thankful right now.  We were discussing the preparation I give parishioners for some of the Church’s significant sacraments: marriage, confirmation, baptism – or the baptism of parents’ babies.  I think I shocked my seminarian a little when I told him that my preparation work for that last set – the parents of infants being baptized – gets handled in one 1.5-hour session (after they’ve read a short – but very good – booklet about baptism[ii]). 

“But, it’s baptism,” he told me.  “It’s such an important sacrament!  Our pastoral theology professor tells us that we should spend months preparing people for baptism!”

Ah, yes.  Priests probably should spend months preparing people for baptism.  It is super important and such a significant moment in our lives of faith.  I 100% agree that we should spend months preparing people for their own baptisms or for the baptisms of their children. 

But the gulf between should and doable in the Church is often vast and that is certainly true when it comes to baptismal preparation.  The parents in my parish who want to get their children baptized?  They are parents who both work full-time jobs, who have young children – sometimes newborn infants, who are trying to juggle bed-times at home and over-times at work and intimate-times (if they’re lucky!) between themselves and worship-times (because, God love them, they really do want to bring their kids to church) on Sundays and there is no way in heaven or hell that I am going to put the obstacle of months of preparation between them and the sacrament of baptism for their children.  That seems un-pastoral at best and cruel at worst and, besides all that, it’s just plain really poor evangelism. 

Which brings me back to Project Runway.  In seminary, priests and pastors are taught a lot about the shoulds, the ideals.  We are shown what beautiful, well-done liturgy looks like, what excellent Christian formation consists of, what brilliant preaching sounds like.  It’s like we’re taken to the fabric store with thousands of dollars to spend and all the time in the world to design amazing garments of faith.  And then, we get ordained and we find ourselves in places where resources are lacking – either financial or human or both – and asked to come up with the same sort of garments and it is never going to happen!  Instead, we’re given the religious equivalent of some butcher paper, a little electrical tape and a few red solo cups and we have just got to make it work. 

And here’s the thing: by God’s grace, so many of us do.  My colleagues and I take the bare essentials of materials – some decent, if not entirely modern available resources (like my little baptism booklet), some very willing hearts and minds and spirits (like my dear Thankful Ones), some good knowledge and pastoral skills – and make really fantastic Christians and Christian communities out of it all.  Is it perfect?  No.  Is it the ideal?  No.  But does it work?  Yes.  By the grace of God, it works. 

[i] Side note: I used to dream about writing to Project Runway and suggesting that they have a challenge where designers have to create a garment for young female priests that is both modest and good-looking – a significant challenge – and maybe I could even get a bit role as a model!  But the sartorial challenges of female clergy is a topic for a whole different blogpost.

[ii] Sadly, the booklet is now out of print so costs about $100, but the copies I have are from when it was still in print and cost about $8 each.