Sanctuary
“Listen,” says the poet Longfellow – riding the updraft of Alec Schumacker’s beautiful music. “Listen … and learn there may be worship without words.” Most of us make our pilgrimages to the cathedral of pines from time to time. On some of these bitterly, beautifully cold first nights of winter, the vaulted ceiling of the sky is practically porous with wordless starlight. What more sacred place can there be than the wordless embrace of such beauty and peace, a respite for the senses in the sacred architecture where heaven and nature sing?
Longfellow says that you don’t necessarily need architecture to fashion sanctuary. You don’t necessarily need matter, either. We make sanctuaries out of occasion all the time: we wind our way down the pilgrimage of the year to a particular time that offers the shelter and safety of familiarity and tradition. This evening, for instance. We hallow out a piece of time, hold it up, notice its towers, how porous it is to memories, how little it depends on words. The sacred architecture of occasion, swept by wind tamed and polished into voice and song, is a sanctuary – a respite for memory.
It’s interesting that we’ve fashioned such a sanctuary out of this particular occasion. It’s ironic that we count on taking refuge under the vault of music and story at this time of year – because the safety and warmth of sanctuary seem to have utterly eluded the characters in the story around which we gather. What might have seemed to be shaping up as a story about place – God-with-us, dwelling among us in a sanctuary of redeemed relationships – quickly becomes a story of dis-place-ment. Mary and Joseph are refugees from a musclebound empire that thinks it knows what’s best for all the outlying lands of the world. The news that we will come to see as the hinge of history comes first to poor laborers whose names history never bothered to remember – and even their silent cathedral of the night sky cracked open, and all those Glorias turned out to be, not only celestial entertainment, but the charter of an unexpected journey that changed them forever. And the three magi had the worst of it: looking for the sanctuary to which the heavens seem to be pointing, they stopped in at the welcome center to ask directions – but it didn’t take them long to discover that what Herod had to offer was all sanctimony and no sanctuary at all; afterwards, they made their way home by another way, displaced. And even the sanctuary of the stable in Bethlehem was quickly deconstructed, in that part of the story we almost never have the heart to read, where Herod decided that his best hope of protecting the sanctuary of his power was a campaign of infanticide.
But perhaps even more for these reasons, we savor this sanctuary of occasion, marked as it is by wind and star and music and story – though perhaps the heart of it does lie beyond the reach of words after all. We wind our way down the pilgrimage of the year to the cathedral of light and song. But instead of towers there are rafters – instead of pine needles, hay. Instead of acolytes, there are cows and sheep and field mice.
1 The liturgy for this Service of Lessons and Carols included a performance, by the Williams College Concert Choir, of a new composition by its 2007-08 Student Conductor, Alexander Schumacker ’08: a setting of the poem “My Cathedral” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
At the end of another sacred journey – the journey of the story of Charlotte’s Web – this is the kind of sanctuary that is waiting:
Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur [the pig] all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web. Life in the barn was very good – night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
It is good, isn’t it, this life in the barn? One isn’t accustomed to thinking of this building that way – or this sparkling college – or this village beautiful – but there it is. Time passes, seasons turn and turn us with them – and though there is much to threaten us or seduce us in the world outside with its dubious machinations, its soul-selling, hair-splitting negotiations about what forms of inflicted suffering do or do not constitute torture – we push it all aside to come to the barn, with mud or slush on our party shoes. We come seeking respite – for we do need this night. We come here to mark the time, to notice it – and in noticing the time, to hallow it, to take sanctuary in it for giving praise to the One who comes to inhabit our crowded time with us so as to call us beyond our obsessive ways of living time and into the embrace of time itself. Winter now, and spring one day sooner than we expect – dull days and bright days, days of peace and days of struggle and, perhaps, days of blood… It is the best place to be, this warm shelter, this sanctuary. Our life together here in this barn, to be sure, has its garrulous geese, its sleek but passing swallows. But glory be to God for the sameness of sheep, the sameness of sheep, and the steadfast sameness of the calling to shepherd them and tend them, and to learn from their needs. And God knows there is the smell of manure too in this barn, reminding us of many things – at least one of them, growth. Spring and fall. The redemptive love of creatures, and the glory of everything. Life in the shelter of the barn is very good.
And outside, under the vaulted rafters of the night sky – outside the great globe itself is a barn too, its creatures jostling together, garrulous, miraculous, so fragile. The warmth between us is about our most infinitely renewable resource – O, for more of that kind of global warming – as we huddle together against the shadows of death and greed and hatred. Life in the barn is a hard life, just now. Maybe it will all come apart; maybe we will have to make our loudest barnyard noises, sing our hopes and glories at the top of our lungs, to keep it all together.
But the moment we remember the coldness blowing around the world, and feel it threaten to sponge up and wring out the warmth and safety of our sanctuary – then, of all things, we have stumbled close to the heart of what God is up to. For the word at the heart of this story and the light that shines in this occasion and the foundation beneath this sanctuary is not safety at all, but courage.
2 From the concluding paragraphs of E.B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web (New York: HarperCollins, 1952).
It is a dangerous thing that God is undertaking, even in the warmth of the barn. And it is a dangerous thing we are undertaking too – to midwife this newborn king, to grasp for a child in the carnage of earthly birthing and cradle it in a world of Herods – to embrace this child, and all that this represents, with tender care, knowing that caring will make the sorrows hurt more, when they come. It is not safe to care as much as we try to care, in coming here, if by safety you mean putting trust in the perfect security of the barn – for the barn is porous to sadness. It is warm in here – and this warmth of community we share is what we have to give. But it is not safe in here in any of the ways the world teaches us to crave safety – except one.
The safety that is ours – the sanctuary that shelters this child and his refugee parents and us with them – is the certainty that our company in the battered and sometimes fearful barn of this world is the deepest form of joy available to people. That’s what he was born here to teach us. It is a joy wider than the world, so much wider than the mere “happiness” of the American dream or any other little terrestrial dream. It is a joy that requires nothing more than, nothing less than, each other. It is a joy that only needs the sanctuary of the barn, or of the pines, or of the moment, to be its home. It scarcely needs a word. It only needs company.
So again the occasion beckons, and we wind our way down the pilgrimage of the year toward the light coming from the sanctuary of the barn. In through the door, craving safety, hungry for hope, in we come, bringing all the precious little moments of our living. They cling to us like the burrs of a late autumn walk: all our best loves and all our sorrows for the ones we miss and all our risings to the cries for help around us. All our moments are seed for the granary, grist for living, seed we’ll scatter liberally upon the fertile ground when the season changes again. For now, the ground is frozen – but perhaps one day it will all sprout again, in the mystery of God’s ways in these things, and grow up and yield something that is better than we were before – bring to fruition something among us more hopeful, more decent, more loving than any of us can quite manage alone.
And for now, Jesus will choose to be born here, in the barn. He always does. And we gather close around the birth, for warmth. Always, always it is the best place to be, this place of earthy honesty and the hope of company which are our only safety and our best joy. Night and day, seed-time and harvest, the ever-turning seasons of our lives and our poor ramshackle earth… This is the place that he chooses as sanctuary – with its garrulous geese , its passing swallows, the sameness of sheep, the smell of manure, and – praise God, and God help us, too – the glory, somehow, of everything.
The Rev. Richard E. Spalding,
Chaplain to the College
Williamstown, Massachusetts
