What’s In a Name?

Surprisingly, a lot. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an attic is “the space or room at the top of a building, under the roof, often used for storing things.” Attics are sometimes used as a bedroom or a study or even a small apartment. In slang an attic can refer to a person’s head or brain.

When used to store things, attics can contain forgotten treasures. They can also contain white elephants and other junk. A white elephant is “something that is expensive, or that costs a lot of money to keep in good condition, but that has no useful purpose and is no longer wanted.” It may have been offered for sale at one point in time, but no one wanted to buy it. Consequently, it was relegated to the attic rather than thrown on the scrap heap or taken to the rubbish dump lest someone’s feelings may be hurt even though that person may have departed from this life a long time ago. Or whoever stored it in the attic could not bring themselves to dispose of it. They may have told themselves that they might find some use for it someday.

Attics were also used to house members of a family who were intellectually impaired, physically deformed, or mentally-ill or whom the family otherwise wanted to lock away out of sight. A visitor might hear them thumping about in the attic. “Squirrels,” a nervous family member might say.

Rummaging through an attic, shooing away the spiders and other denizens of the attic and dusting off whatever catches our eye can be a pleasant way to pass the time. In this blog I may do some attic rummaging. I may also do some window shopping. For the most part I will be giving readers a peek into my thought world.

As for explaining what is an Anglican, I not even going to try. This certainly will not make happy those who hold a particular opinion of what is Anglican and what is not and who may be disappointed by any explanation that I may offer.

What is called “Anglicanism” can be compared to the view seen through a kaleidoscope, “a toy in the shape of a tube, that you look through to see different patterns of light made by pieces of colored glass and mirrors.” Each time you turn the kaleidoscope the pattern of light changes so each person looking through the kaleidoscope sees something different. They may like the pattern that they see. Or they may dislike it. If they like it, they may want to keep it that way. If they don’t like it, they may want to change it. The only thing that does not change is the color and size of pieces of glass, the material thy are made from, and how the mirrors are arranged.

This description of “Anglicanism” may not make many people happy either.

Out of child-like curiosity we might take apart the kaleidoscope and examine what is creating the patterns of light seen through it, only to discover that we have no better understanding of the thing we call “Anglicanism” than we had before. The pattern of light we saw through the kaleidoscope may grip our imagination much more strongly that the pieces of colored glass and the mirrors scattered on the floor or table before us.