Reflection on a Blessing
A SERMON BY REV LINDA HART
I had been thinking a lot about this room during the week knowing that I wanted to invite you all to help to get it all tarted up for the holiday season which is so totally upon us. I knew that one of the topics to be raised was the whole idea of the soul of a place, how a space gets decorated when we come to it over and over again.
It was nine years ago when my family returned to the Washington DC area where I grew up, and during our stay, my Aunt Eileen died, and my cousins asked me to take her memorial service. As I sat in the sanctuary of the church where the service was being held, I looked out the glass walls at the early autumn day, and thought of the moments that my family had spent there in that room, and it seemed that spirits were hovering near. A different aunt had been married there. We had also remembered her life and gave thanks for it there. My uncle John, Eileen’s husband had been remembered there. My mother’s memorial service had been held there. The space was a sacred space not because it had been named such, but because of what had happened there, the moments of grief and joy and gratitude and loss woven into the rafters and draped across the colourful glass in the walls.
This room has that same sort of resonance. Completed in 1896, it has been home to sweet promises of love in the presence of friends and families, it has enclosed in an embrace families torn by grief. Babies have squealed and cried as water was touched to their heads in blessing. On this site, words of promise and possibility have been spoken to cheer those who were afraid and lost, words of comfort, prayers for healing and health and wholeness have been offered aloud and in breaking hearts. Countless people have come through the doors seeking some kind of courage and comfort, and I hope most of them have found it. Music has blessed the walls and the ceiling so high above. Voices have lifted up in song, tuneful or not, everyone of them a joyous noise to the holy. Gratitude has been murmured in golden moments.
This room, this space, holds that kind of power that Neil Gaiman described in the American roadside attractions. And I hope that in this place – at least occasionally – we feel that kind of satisfaction that Gaiman suggests, a satisfaction on a level we cannot truly describe, as well as that profound dissatisfaction on the level beneath. It is what happens when you stop for a moment and notice that you are in a place that is somehow a focusing point or channel or window open to the immanent. That’s what this room is.
I’ve also been thinking about enchantment, and this especially enchanting time of year. Watching as twinkling lights begin to adorn shops and streets, the trees beginning to glitter without benefit of ice, baubles and glitter and shiny balls are decking halls everywhere perhaps even in your home already. We are coming into an enchanting time of year when we are helped to see the world as shot through with wonder and beauty, if our eyes can open to it, if we have the energy to look beyond the cheap tinsel and hear beyond the tinny carols played on tiny speakers in overcrowded shops. Look: the world is sparkling. Listen: angels are singing. This is an enchanted place where miraculous things can happen.
This morning, I was going to ask you all to help to bring that enchantment into this space. My plan was to bring out the boxes of Christmas decorations to again adorn our space in our usual quirky and sometimes random fashion, to set angels on tables and tie tinsel to the lectern, and arrange all manner of bits and bobs of glitter and twinkle as is in our power to place to illumine the holy that shines always in this room, to re-enchant it for the holidays so that in this season of dark and occasional madness we remember the humble and holy gifts that reside here all the time. And you can see that those boxes are out and our Christmas trees have been set at the front of the church so that we can take part in that enchantment.
Before we do that, however, we need to do something else. As I mentioned earlier today, our church was broken into on Thursday night, and on Friday morning Peter and I and two of the workers from the nursery surveyed the damage, watched as the forensics team looked for evidence that the burglars might have left, and talked to the helpful and mildly cynical police officers who came to take information about what we found when we opened the doors that morning. It was distressing and sad to see our beautiful glass broken again, to see the damage done to the vestry, though I was grateful that there was very little that they could take from us, and that our sound system and microphones were still here.
There was a violation of our space, and today, I want us to re-bless this room and the rest of our church, too, as you are willing to join in. Here at the front, there are tea lights. I invite you to take one and to find a place to set it down to re-bless, to re-enchant that place. It can be anywhere in the church or in the hall or the kitchen. You may need to place a few. As you set it, offer a word of thanks or a prayer or simple pause in the moment, breathe three or four breaths. Or even offer a word of forgiveness, whatever word of forgiveness you need to offer.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
Bless us and this place
remind us of the holy that abides
where people of good will gather,
remind us that the holy abides
where we join to seek some moment of
truth, of solace, of courage, of hope.
The deepest truth of this place,
the deepest truth of ourselves
is that something of the transcendent
something of what is pure and good
something of what is holy
abides, no matter what has been broken
or injured, no matter what has been
damaged.
The holy abides.
May we in the days to come,
in the enchantment of these days
of winter festival and holiday
see with new eyes the glimmer of that beauty in all,
may we listen with new ears to the songs of angels,
however they come to us.
The holy abides. Here. Everywhere. World without end. Amen.