September 24, 2015

Little Free Library: Practicing Giving and Receiving

You may have seen a Little Free Library or two in your neck of the woods. They are popping up all over the place -- a small creative mode of freecycling that allows strangers and neighbors to share books with one another. They are basically just boxes, placed at eye level, with a door and some shelves. They hold anywhere from a handful of books to a few dozen. The idea is that you can either take or leave a book, no questions asked, and no library card required.

St. Mary's recently installed a little free library in our prayer garden. It's a small always-open space with a couple of benches and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. People come to sit, pray, sleep, chat, and smoke (judging by the cigarette butts we have to sweep up from time to time!). Now they can read and "shop" for books.

When we put in the library, I imagined it would take the neighborhood a while to catch on. There aren't any other free libraries in our area. It seemed like a good spot; it’s on a street with substantial pedestrian traffic and next door to an elementary school. Our congregation has plenty of readers, and book donations have poured in. We've asked people to focus on children's books, with our school neighbors in mind, but we have received a predictably wide variety of things.

The library has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. Far from struggling to catch on, it emptied almost immediately. The first week, we were actually suspicious that someone was taking all the books and doing something with them. Not sure what...resale on the black market? Hoarding them in a tiny apartment somewhere? Used books are really mostly good for one thing: reading! Our initial suspicions reminded me of how little experience most of us have with given things away truly for free, no questions asked. Seeing how hard it was to offer up our motley collection of books without suspicion turned out to be a spiritual lesson in generosity and offering, among other things.

With further observation, it turns out that the library is just popular. People of all ages and descriptions stop by daily to check out the selection. A little girl gleefully described for me each of her small cousins and what they like to read. She lovingly selected a book for each of them, and ran off, thrilled to be bearing such valuable gifts. A group of middle school girls asked shyly if I could help them identify chapter books that weren't to "grown up-y" (we're putting out the word for middle-school appropriate donations). I saw a group of boys in their late teens look around furtively to see if anyone was watching, then pull open the door to check out the selection. A pile of Korean fashion magazines appeared, and then quickly went out again. Ditto a set of books on learning Chinese. Even the accounting textbooks that someone donated from their long-ago MBA program have been surprisingly popular.

This is such a simple, DIY project. If you’re in a place where people walk around at all, I'd urge you to think about whether your church might be able to install and support a Little Free Library. I like to think of it as one of those projects where Jesus doesn't have to wear a nametag. We don't have it plastered in Bible verses, and we haven't focused on religious literature. But it is a little space where we practice giving and receiving, little free acts of matching abundance with hunger. It's practice we all need.

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