March 5, 2000

James R. Gorman

Unlike most of the rest of you, I have the special gift, if you can call it that, of seeing this place empty for most of the week. This space, now some 43 years old, has seen the comings and goings of the faithful, the not so faithful and the completely unfaithful alike. Saints and sinners have occupied these benches and have been in every imaginable mood and temperament. But I see it empty most of the time.

I have walked in this room so often that I can find my way in the dark. Partly because I have bumped my toes and knees trying to get from that side (to my right) over there to the doors here and there on my left. If the light is out, I have to cross the room in total darkness until I reach the light switch behind me on the wall to my left. So, by the process of success and error, I have learned by heart the contours of this place in its darkest and emptiest times.

One of the most forlorn times in this place is right after worship after everyone has left. I walk back through this place after I've locked all the doors and I can still smell all the perfumes, aftershaves and colognes that you have brought to this place. I can smell the smell of the community for a time after you have left. The party is over. My friends have gone home. Our time together is over again for another week. But the fragrance you leave behind lingers for a moment to remind me of the treasure you are.

This room is little more than concrete block and colored glass and birch-wood and wrought iron. Building material in itself does not make for holiness. St. Paul writes in one of his more poetic moments,

"Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal process in Christ

and through us spreads everywhere

the fragrance of the knowledge of him." (2 Cor. 2:14)

For me this place is filled with memories, and seeing it empty throughout the week is a mixed blessing. It reminds me of the holiness we share from week to week. The ways in which we have encountered each other and our Christ in this simple structure. But its emptiness is kind of forlorn. Still, even in its emptiness it bears a certain set of memories that cannot be extinguished. Memories of baptisms I have participated in of infants who are now young adults. Memories of marriages of young couples who are now raising their own children, most of them scattered all across the country. Memories, most poignantly, of funerals.

This place has a holiness because of the memories it bears on our behalf. The very stones seem to contain distant thoughts and recollections.

I remember the story of a woman, let's call her Mary, who had lost her husband. Like many widows, Mary could not return to church right away. Her children, who did not live in the city where they were born, had invited her to live with them for the rest of the winter and she agreed reluctantly. When Mary returned to church in the spring, she found that the place where she and her husband had sat together for 30 years was now occupied by a young couple who had just started coming to the church in the time while Mary was away.

Mary went to the pastor after a couple of Sundays of sitting in a place other than the one she and her husband had occupied. She said to the pastor at coffee hour, "Pastor Gail, I know that I shouldn't feel this way, in fact I feel horrible for feeling this way, but I'm finding it difficult coming to church and not be able to sit in the same place that Harold and I sat in all those years. I've told no one else this. Only you. And I just don't know what to do."

And Pastor Gail, without a pause, led the woman by hand across the fellowship room and introduced this woman to the young couple. It turned out that they were the age of her grandchildren, and the young woman was expecting a child. And that was the end of their conversation.

The next Sunday by sheer coincidence (though I'm increasingly convinced that in the economy of God, there are no coincidences), this young couple and the widow arrived in the parking lot at the same time and walked to the door together. They picked up the conversation that they had begun the week before in the coffee hour and quite by accident they walked into the church, down the side aisle and into the very pew where Harold and Mary had sat for 30 years.

And for the first time since her husband's funeral, Mary saw her church from the vantage point that she had shared with Harold all those years, but now with new companions. As luck would have it, (it is just luck, isn't it?) these young people had moved to the city for employment reasons and were now far away from either of their parents. And Mary's children, also following the patterns of employment, were far away from her.

They began going out to brunch together at local family restaurants. A new family was formed through the sharing of a sacred space, a space where lives are transfigured.

I have come to discover that there is a kind of transfiguration that takes place here each Sunday. It's not really a laser light show exactly. It's more like the morning sun shining through a piece of colored glass and landing on the carpet in a certain familiar way. When the sermon drifts off into some territory beyond comprehension, there is still that spot of light on the carpet that has a way of reminding you of the goodness of God. Or it's one of the kids in front of you furiously coloring some indecipherable shape in the bulletin. It's the smell of the wine when the covers are taken off just before it is distributed into the pews.

Or it is the smell of the assembled fragrances, the colognes and the aftershaves, all mixed together.

I think that transfiguration is more than a light show. It is far more ordinary than that. But it takes a skilled eye to see it.

Maybe it takes going to a far off land to see things in odd ways before you see the ordinary things around you for the special gifts that they are. These marvelous moments of flashing joy that allow us to look through a kind of window into the actual, good, generous and powerful heart of the universe itself, a heart that belongs to a hidden God who loves us and reminds us of that love in ordinary and yet inexplicably transcendent ways.

If you can see the work of God in the ordinary and still powerfully transcendent manifestations all around you, then you can attend joyously to the mundane anxieties of life. Roberta Bondi, professor of Church History at Emory University in Atlanta, has written of one of her powerful transfiguring experiences within the ordinariness of life, and she concludes:

A long time later, as I sat in my chair, the intensity of my joy and the drunken clarity of my thought subsided. After a while, I took up my vacuuming, and I dusted. I cleaned the bathroom, then I threw out some of the moldy stuff from the refrigerator, and like one miraculously snatched from death, I enjoyed all these everyday tasks with a single heart.

Transfiguration is all around us. It is most significantly in the ordinariness of this very place. I'd love to have you all stay here through the whole week and we could party together (maybe Rosemary could dance for us again!) and we would never tire of telling all the old stories about old friends departed who were courageous in their faith, and new friends we've made who face new challenges.

But we have places to go and things to do in the name of the one we have met here. So, we move on. We taste for a moment of the very goodness of the Lord and move on into the world God so loved, thankful for this moment of sustenance and ready to face a week where transfiguration is more of an oddity than it is here.

Transfigure us, O Lord. Shine among us, so that we might be transformed to do your work in a world in desperate need of transfiguration.