A Temporary Alternative World
IKEA is a temporary alternative world. There is something strange that happens when you walk into an IKEA. I’m not talking about the Las Vegasian psychology of the inescapable maze route. I’m not talking about the full delicious breakfast at $1.99. It’s not the lingonberry frozen yogurt or Swedish meatballs.
It’s the showrooms. As you step into a perfectly manicured cube posing as a boy’s room, you virtually swoon in the magical illusion. This could be. I could see this happening. So Euro. So minimal, modern. So tidy, too. On point. The lighting comes from no less than eight different, subtle angles. Those set-designed rooms convince you that a flat-packed couch with matching throw pillows might transform a dull and tired space back home. They might bring beautiful order to the boy and his room.
You buy the flat-packed couch with storage options and modular companionship with a lofted bed and study nook. You buy the throw pillows. Home you go. Six hours, thirteen mild expletives, and one stripped hex tool later it appears in the boy’s room. Not bad.
But not good either.
Something is amiss. A certain je ne sais quoi. You do not have the same feeling as you did on the IKEA showroom floor. There is no magic. The carpet is stained from the boy smuggling in prohibited juice boxes. It seems dusty. Clutter is usually uncluttered by type. There are too many types happening. The rest of the room is not thematically aligned. The décor can be described as late twentieth century Goodwillian with deferential avant-garde influences of Salvation Armée.
In those moments, fingers still nursing the blooming blister from the hex tool, the reason becomes clear: you needed to buy it all for the magic to be transferred over to the chambre du garçon.
But more than that. The entire showroom cubicle would need to be rebuilt inside the Room of the Boy. One measly light source from the center of the ceiling was never going to produce what you felt on that Saturday afternoon just 25 yards from the IKEA cafeteria. That temporary alternative world can exist only in IKEA.
A temporary alternative world. That phrase comes from Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, 2018). Ms. Parker studied organizational design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her book details the best environments conducive to a gathering of people well met. Each chapter is worth exploring, but I was struck by her chapter on meetings that offer a temporary alternative world as the ones that are the most compelling, useful, and enjoy a retention of voluntary and desirous attendance.
Among many variables, Ms. Parker identified one as necessary and unique to groups that are filled with attractive vitality: the emerging rise of rules for gathering. She explained that many seemingly arbitrary etiquettes passed on from rich, old, white people ensured that a group would remain stable, closed, and homogenous. She rightly noted, however, that most of us are living in unstable, open, and diverse communities. We have abandoned antiquated etiquette(s). Hence, the need for a set of rules that govern proceedings and gatherings of those quite dissimilar. Interestingly, she stated that the rules could not become the focus, but rather the guidelines of corporate behavior were in place so that the real intended focus of the meeting could be realized. In this environment, an event happens that is something special and unique to its meeting. Un-gathered, it would not materialize. It doesn’t happen elsewhere and it doesn’t happen through the course of normal routine. Something occurs that is a temporary alternative world.
Being a minister, I could not help but think of worship as a temporary alternative world. It feels like IKEA and then you go home and it doesn’t. The community is widely diverse. The rules are not the point, but they help focus on the Point. Without gathering it wouldn’t materialize. The common retort is: “But I can worship anywhere! When I’m alone, hiking, fishing, singing in the shower; YouTube.” True enough; of course, we can worship privately. I can play pickleball by myself, too, but the game is fuller when it’s played with three other people with bad knees. There is a temporary alternative world when four convene—a world that is only in existence when they gather. There are more images-of-God concentrated in one place than staring at one image-bearer in the full-length closet mirror, or monitor.
Worship is an experience that isn’t normal. It’s a tantalizing picture of an alternative world. But it ends. It’s temporary. You have work on Monday. You have cluttered relationships and problems that defy organization by type. The throw pillows that you’ve tried don’t solve all that much. That’s the magic of a temporary alternative world. It feels so good there in the showroom with the Swedish meatballs and lingonberry sauce awaiting around the corner.
Worship has been that lifeline for me—so very not like the world that bops you on the nose and kicks you betwixt the A-frame of your legs. If only we could bring some of that home.
Jesus taught a prayer that obstinately will not accept our normal routines as the true normal. He thinks our normal is the broken abnormal. He’s been in the Showroom that is most real, most beautiful, most like He made it—the realest form of normal. It is a prayer defiant against fragmentation, clutter, and dusty dulled-ness. Thy kingdom come means that He wants more of the showroom being transferred into the stained and tired bedrooms we inhabit. It doesn’t mean we just wait for the Showroom in The Sky. We take some of it home. To work.
When you’ve been in the showroom of worship, you want to come back, to be sure, but you also want to take pieces of it with you. Into every dusty Goodwillian corner. You take parts. It’s not complete. It’s not the full thing, sure. But the experience of worship has you wanting to bottle it up, put it on a flat cart, rope it to the top of your car, and put it in conflict with the menagerie of design choices you’ve been making. The Showroom is being rebuilt in your life and in the dusty corners you inhabit. Worship gives you the ability to bring renewal home—one throw pillow at a time. You cannot get that un-gathered.
by Tim Lien