The New Holy

Retirement some ten years ago took me out of the church and into the world.  It took me out of a handmade sanctuary and into a God created cathedral.  Ever so slowly I began to realize I had been too critical and skeptical of those who chose the outdoors on Sunday morning instead of the pews in front of my pulpit.  And while their insistence that God could better be worshipped on the river might have had an ulterior motive which had nothing to do with God, the setting of creation can indeed be a place where God can be powerfully experienced and known.

 

This truth came to me unexpectedly in those early years of living on the farm surrounded by things made by the Creator instead of things made by the hands and dreams of other humans.  The fields and trees and landscape of the farm became a holy cathedral where walls were defined by the places where earth met sky.  I had often spoken of the sanctuary as being a holy place inside a secular world.  In retrospect it was such a narrow view.  The sanctuary is indeed a place made holy by the prayers and the rituals intent on declaring some spaces holy and set apart for use by God,  but it stands midst a creation that is holy.

Living midst the creation day after brought me to the realization that every inch of ground and every bit of matter and life created by God is holy not because we have declared it to be holy, but because it has all passed into existence through His creating hands.  It often seems that our culture is intent on hiding what is holy by covering it with concrete, asphalt, and towering structures, but the holiness of creation remains. Perhaps, it is becoming harder for us to see, but everywhere our eyes look and everything our hands touch bears the marks of the holy.  It has always been this way.  One of the gifts of retirement was a new awareness of the holy all around me.