THE COLOR OF THE LIGHT

Sometimes I like to sit and meditate in our empty sanctuary during the week.  Other times I just sit there and breathe in the space and look around.  We are blessed, of course, with one of the most lovely and spiritual places imaginable to worship in.  It is not the grandest of churches or even the most beautiful, but it just enfolds me in the sense of the presence of holiness.  Its beauty is not formal or awe inspiring or grand.  It is more comfortable, warm and lived in.  It’s hard to figure out exactly what makes a space or a room seem sacred.  There are many beautiful churches that are well designed and functional that never quite convey that feeling of holiness.  It may have something to do with history, with the spirit with which it was built or ornamented, or with the emotional connotations that its appearance has for each one of us. 

One of the factors involved in our church has to do with the color of the light.  The amber tones of the stained glass windows along the outer walls color the light a warm golden tone that is enriched by the cherry wood that dominates the room.  It seems like you can actually see the air.  The color makes the air around you feel like an actual presence, whereas pure white light simply seems like an absence.  One of the things that every visitor to the old city of Jerusalem discovers is the amazing color of the light there as the desert sun refracts off the golden stones with which it is built.  Our sanctuary has some of that same quality and I have no doubt that it was intentional.

While our building dates from the eighteenth century, nearly everything that we see as we sit there dates from a renovation in 1885.  That is when those windows were done and the cherry pews and furniture were added, all at great expense.  And that is the thing that most strikes and impresses me.  Down through the years, generation after generation has added their own efforts to enhance the beauty and the special quality of the space, and they have spared no expense (our own generation made its contribution with the renovation that was done twelve years ago).  No one seems to have wanted just a functional building to meet in.  No one settled for changes that would just “get by.”  They aimed for beauty.  They paid in money and effort for a little grandeur.  They wanted a place that would inspire.  They worked to make it holy. 

Our quest for some spiritual dimension to our lives is so important that generation after generation has been ready to sacrifice, to give, to work, to aspire, to create a place that would make the presence of God more real in people’s experience.  And so our very building testifies to that deep need in us.  We all need a sacred place.  We need inspiration.  We need moments where some magical combination of beauty and light and atmosphere can lift us out of our everyday concerns and routines and touch us with the poetry of grace.  We need to be reminded that life is deeper, richer, more profound, more connected to all that is, than we usually ever notice.  We need the touch of God in our lives.  Yes, we believe that it is always there, but sometimes it takes the golden glow of the morning light streaming through that stained glass window to open our eyes afresh to what is real.

Try to drop by the church sometime during the week when the sanctuary is empty and just sit and contemplate these things and discover some of the subtle work of God that has come down to us through our forbearers who built it into the very fabric of that place.  We all need the reminder.

YEAR'S END

Someone asked me the other day, what was the best thing that happened to me during 2013.  It was my first year-end question of the season.  It won’t be the last.  Everybody does it.  The New York Times posted their list of the ten best books of 2013 today.  Various media outlets will follow this week with the ten best movies, the ten biggest news stories, the one hundred best photographs, and on and on.  Time magazine already made public their “person of the year” (regrettably, not me or you).

The year-end is a time for rating, summing-up and ranking so many things that happened in the past year.  We seem to have this natural impulse to use the turning of the calendar for making judgments about all kinds of things in our culture and in our lives.  Was the year a success?  Did we accomplish anything?  Did we follow through on any of the resolutions that we made last year at this time (in my case the answer is “no”)?  What were the high points and the low points?  Even though the assigning of the new year to January 1 is completely arbitrary, it still provokes this assessment time.

The assessment process, or course, is not just fun, but an important thing.  It is one of the ways in which we sort through the million events and experiences of the year and figure out which ones were important and memorable and which ones were not.  We literally decide what we will remember.  The vast majority of things that happened during the year will be soon forgotten, in our culture’s life and our personal lives.  We need to sort through all of it to find the gems, the high points, the meaningful things that didn’t just happen, but have helped to shape our lives, because it is those things that we need to hang on to and remember.  This is part of how we make sense of our lives and of who we are.  It is how we turn the chaos of a million, often random, experiences into a narrative that has some meaningful progression.  We take an unshaped list of happenings and find the connections, the contours, the high points, the things that have affected us enough to make us different. 

This doesn’t just happen at the New Year, of course.  It is an ongoing process.  Sometimes we know immediately when something happens to us that it is a big deal and that we will never be quite the same again.  But often times, things sneak up on us.  Something happens or we meet someone or we read some book and it doesn’t stand out from the rest of what’s going on, but in retrospect we begin to realize that it has worked on us and become a part of some sort of transformation.  And sometimes, we have to stop for a moment and reflect back and figure out what those things were that have given new shape to our lives.

This process is not just true of the outer realities and experiences of our lives, but the inner ones as well.  Our spiritual life has contours too.  Our relationship to our inner selves, our relationship to the universe as a whole, our relationship to that reality within and without us that we call God, is moved and shaped and transformed by a million influences, thoughts, insights and revelations during the course of each year.  But because our spiritual lives are so often vague and difficult to articulate or conceive, those spiritual lives can sometimes remain unreflective and unshaped.  Here too, however, the process of finding and contours of the narrative is crucial.  It is important to take stock; to sort out what this year has meant, how is has changed your spiritual life and why.

So along with your personal list of best books or best movies, along with your list of high points and low ones, try to spend a few moments reflecting on how your spiritual lives have changed this year.  What were the insights you stumbled on this year and where did they come from?  What do you believe today that is different from last year or the year before and why?  Are you closer to being the kind of person you feel called to be and what has held you back?  Are you feeling more connected to the things and people that matter?  Are your prayers deeper or richer than before?  Think through your spiritual development like a story and recognize the way in which it has unfolded to bring you to where you are today.

There is one other year–end ritual that our culture goes through.  I watched it this morning on the Today Show as they flashed through a couple of dozen photographs of famous people who have passed away in 2013.  Sometimes we need to reflect on our losses as well.  At First Parish we’ve had a lot this year.  But in each of our personal lives, we’ve had a few.  Take a moment to remember those you’ve lost this year and reflect on what gifts they gave you and left behind them when they died.  This can leave you in awe of how rich your life has been made by the amazing gifts of other lives that touch us and move us every day.

Have a happy and blessed New Year.