It began innocently enough. Ian Marks started collecting sorority and fraternity pins. Not being a collector myself, I don’t really get it. My theme is more decluttering and simplifying. Collections of stuff mainly take up room that can better be used. But I bear no grudge against others who like to collect, and millions of people do.
So Ian Marks collects Greek pins. And he’s a member of the Fraternity Pin Collector Society, which is a real organization. The society met this summer in a basement room at the airport Sheraton in Cleveland, to hold their sixth annual conference, called Pinfest, featuring the combined collections of the members: over 5,000 pins, some studded with pearls and diamonds, and many dating back to the 19th century.
Objectively speaking, most of these pins aren’t worth much; they were given to fraternity or sorority members when they joined, and most spent decades in junk drawers until they were finally given away or maybe sold at a yard sale.
However, something has gone awry in the Greek pin world. Pinfest, this year, was held under Top Secret conditions. The date and place were held in confidence among the members, and they even posted a false date on their web page, to throw off their pursuers.
After cursory discussion at the meeting of routine business, the group turned its focus to what’s really happening in pinworld: the struggle against one Mary Silzel. At first glance, Mrs. Silzel seems an unlikely opponent: she is a 63 yearold grandmother in Southern California. “To the rest of the world,” said the article in the New York Times, “Mary… might be just another woman frittering away her senior years on eBay. But to those gathered at the Pinfest conference, she is the enemy – a one-woman wrecking crew determined to keep them from collecting pins at any cost.
Apparently, Mary and others like her have begun spending big bucks to keep their sorority’s pins out of the hands of nonmembers. Most Greek letter organizations object, officially, to outside ownership of their pins, but have never made an issue of it. Now that internet auctions make it easy to buy and sell these things, some loyal alums are getting upset.
When asked by a reporter, Mary Silzel said that when she first discovered Kappa Kappa Gamma pins on eBay in 1998, she was “shocked.” She started buying them, to keep them out of the hands of outsiders, but couldn’t keep up with the volume, so she recruited helpers. Now she is the leader of a group of about 40 KKG sisters around the country called Keepers of the Key. They have spent more than $17,000 of their own money in the past two years to “rescue,” as they call it, nearly 100 pins.
Why are they doing it? Because, says Silzel, “we are passionate about the integrity of our badges.” Collectors, she says, are “unfit to be in the possession of a Kappa key, given the ideals to which we all pledged ourselves and which are symbolized to us and others by our badge.”
At this point while reading about this in the paper, I was trying to retain some sympathy for the Keepers of the Key. They seem a little obsessed with these pins, but if they really want to spend their own money buying them up, why shouldn’t they? I can accept the idea that the pins stand for ideals of character and the integrity of the group members. But I have to admit my sympathy was weak. There is an ancient biblical term for getting overfocused on a thing in place of the ideals it stands for: it’s called idolatry.
Idolatry was taken so seriously by the Hebrews that its prohibition is one of the Ten Commandments. “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above.” Many people today, though, don’t relate much to the idea of forsaking graven images of the divine. It sounds so irrelevant, or even superstitious, that I suspect most of us don’t give it a second thought.
If we translate the concept a bit, we might find it has contemporary application. Perhaps a graven image is not just a relic found in a medieval church, or a golden calf. A graven image might come in the form of a sorority pin, if the pin itself, rather than the ideals it represents, has taken on ultimate importance.
Consider religious zealotry. How easy is it for people to use religion as a weapon to harm others, rather than a tool of self-examination and morality, to improve themselves and the world? How many have been slaughtered, supposedly in the name of God, but in fact because blind righteousness has taken the place of the true message of faith? This is a kind of idolatry, in which belief has been taken so far beyond the point of reason that it loses all perspective and becomes evil.
Or take an example so common it’s frightening. Clinton Lee Scott wrote that “Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.” Religion is frequently substituting worship of people for the pursuit of ideals. It is certainly possible to worship the person as an avenue to living according to his message; however, it is easy to fall into the trap of worshipping the person instead of doing the difficult work of living the message. But are there are other forms of idolatry that creep into our lives, however innocently? What happens when a hobby or a pastime becomes an obsession? I knew a man who collected old magazine advertisements. He loved to poke around in antique shops and find rare or historic magazines, from which he cut out and catalogued the ads. This hobby brought him pleasure, but he began to spend so much time at it that his relationship with his wife suffered. She grew, over time, to hate his ad collection, even as she felt a little ridiculous for having feelings about pieces of paper. But it was his attention she was missing, and there was a kernel of truth in her suspicion that he cared more about the ads than he did about her.
Or what was more likely was that he found it easier to disappear into his hobby room than to face the difficulties that had grown over time in their relationship. The habit of not communicating entrenched itself, and eventually they faced a fullblown crisis.
At the root of the commandment against idolatry, is the truth that when an image, or a pin, or an activity, becomes a substitute for our efforts to lead lives of value and meaningful relationship and pursuit of what really matters most, then we have missed the mark, not only as people of faith, but as people who relate to one another.
The worship of money is a classic case. Money should serve us as we pursue the most important values in our lives, but when it becomes an end in itself, and when acquiring it crosses over into idolatry, then we are serving it rather than the other way around.
In this society, food and body image and appearance can become idols, especially for women, but sometimes for men as well. To a point, it’s a good thing to try to be healthy and to care about appearance, but when the mirror or the scale has the power to devastate us, then we have lost our way.
I am sure we all know something about idols. Contemporary American life is teeming with possibilities for false gods: food, alcohol, drugs, power, prestige, television, video games, internet surfing. How about the lives of our children, as a substitute for thinking about our own? Or over-focus on work or sports or shopping, or even the past? Or agitating for or against burning a flag, the symbol of, but not the reality of, our nation?
None of these things is inherently bad; yet each of them can become destructive if we let it. Emerson had it right: “It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” May we have the courage to scale back our obsessions and evasive habits, and make room for that which is of true value underneath
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