Thinking Out Loud at Eastertide

If you have read my blog, you know that I love church buildings, the people who worship in them, and the different ways in which they worship. 

Even though I have my own church membership, I often wander away in order to experience the Spirit in different settings. It's nothing new for me. I am compelled for various reasons that even I don't fully understand. It is not as if I am searching as much as accidentally finding my own private spiritual places. 

Before I joined a congregation, I often photographed Tallahassee area churches. Sometimes I toured them empty, yet alive and breathing; sometimes I visited them and worshiped among strangers. 

Afterwards, I would develop my photos, if I had any. I wrote, not the histories of the buildings, but about the feelings the actual structures invoked in me. Sometimes a poem (or a sketch, or both) can be seen wandering down the clear areas of those photographs; like Chinese art – show and tell.

Some of the churches I photographed revealed themselves to me as my own special thin places, those spots where heaven and earth seem to merge like a spiritual wormhole. Like visiting a cloister. Like chanting.  Churches aren't always thin places just as thin places are not always churches.

There are several churches in Wilmington that I discovered as a young girl. There are even more here in Tallahassee. All speak to me in various ways.  One church near my house has a picnic table on the grounds where I often take my sandwich and enjoy nature. Another is antebellum, and religious history shoves itself into my face there for better or for worse. Several older and larger churches are representative of the establishment, traditional. One is Coptic.

This morning, my Facebook page looks like an advertisement for Easter services of several kinds in several places. I put the reposts there because time flies for the elders. They are only reminders to me that, this year, I want to spend Easter in several of my thin places. I want to worship without chatter and conversation, without membership (so to speak), and without the feeling that the edges are thickening around my spiritual wormholes.

I belong to a universal church; not a building, although I often hold private services in my garden with only birds and squirrels and cats (sitting on the porch railings) to observe my presence I'm a member of a world-wide community of believers, worshipers, listeners, and doers. I know my purpose and it is my calling. Yet, I love and appreciate the various church buildings because they are symbols of the church of which Jesus was speaking in the scriptures. They are homes to the Holy Spirit who also resides in all of us. 

My thin places have much to tell me. The message is usually not the one I came to hear. That's why I love to visit them (as well as several cemeteries, parks, beaches and woodlands) and listen for clarity and for a moment of closeness to my next home – after this life is done.

The Thin Places