Sunday evening we dedicated our new space, and it was a marvelous event. For those of you who missed it, here is the story I told to dedicate the RE classrooms:
A House for the Spirit
With this story, I am going to need your help. I’m going ask you all to participate as I tell the story, which is called “A House for the Spirit”.
First, I ask you all to look out these windows at the trees outside.
A long, long time ago, before there were houses, electric lights, or shopping malls, people lived out in and among nature. Out in nature they felt surrounded by the mystery, the spirit, what some of them called God.
And now turn back and look around, at each other.
Then there came a time when some people started living together in villages. They shared ideas about all kinds of things, about how to live together, and they shared their ideas about the spirit. They felt that spirit surrounding them when babies were born or when a loved one died. They felt the spirit when the crops grew tall, and also when the herds sickened and died. At times they loved the spirit and at times they feared it, but they felt it there with them.
And now I need just a few people to lift their arms to the sky, and stand tall like a tree.
As villages grew and buildings were built, special places were made just for being with the Spirit. Some of these places were out in nature, such as a grove of trees or in great fields cut into a spiral path.
And now I need a few folks to stand and link arms, like an arch.
Some were built of stone in ways that captured the light of the sun. Some were pyramids that seemed to have steps that went on forever, while others were little more than a tent in the dessert.
OK, you can all drop your arms for a bit.
But all of them were sacred, built as a house for the Spirit, a house for God, a place to think and feel deeply on the mysteries that exist within all life.
Today, there are many ways that people think of God, the spirit, and the mystery, and there are many different kinds of houses where people go to worship.
There are minarets. Can some of you make minarets with your arms?
And there are tall bell towers. Can someone tall pretend to ring a bell up high?
There are sacred caves. Can you all pretend to squeeze in somewhere enclosed?
There are tiny little wayside chapels. Now we need some kids to make themselves into short chapels.
And there are big old cathedrals. Now we need some grown-ups to hold hands and be a cathedral.
There are simple monasteries where time seems to have stopped. Everyone fold your hands down quietly.
And there are modern mega-churches as big as stadiums and full of noise and pizzazz. Everyone throw your hands up high!
But all these different places are for sharing ideas, being in community, and feeling the Spirit, whatever we call it.
If I can ask you to do one more, slightly silly thing with your hands. It’s something you probably know from childhood.
Here is the church
Here is the steeple
Open up the doors
And there are the people.
It is the people. We create sacred space whenever we come together. Please join hands with the people around you. This is how we build our church, by coming together in community, and this is how we make a house for our Spirit.
