It is a .07 mile walk from my place to heaven. Or, at least as close as Posie and I have been to heaven so far.
You see, my friend Susan lives in a house that was originally built as a traditional, wood-framed Episcopal chapel by Seattle’s St. Mark’s Parish in 1919. She found the house the day my son was born 22 years ago. Literally, she left the birth room where she served as our doula, went to meet the selling agent, and started building her offer on the spot. I’m not even sure she got a shower in between these administrations. At least that’s the story I’ve held dear all these years.
The house wears its soul on its sleeve just as my friend does. I’ve never seen a home fit a person so very well. If this home were a glove, Susan is the hand it was made for. Still, the fact that we are mostly the same size isn’t lost on me. And our hands are definitely the same size. I confirmed this on a recent winter day as I grabbed a pair of her gloves on my way out the door instead of my own.
All that is to say it makes sense that when I am in this house, it’s warmth and history and spirit wrap snugly around me as well. Like a blanket . . .or a glove.
Sometimes I wonder if the house and I and Susan and my son too aren’t woven together in some cosmic story I’m too human to understand. I wonder if the birth we all shared that day in 1998 actually called her here to this house. And if that is why from the day she bought it, Susan’s house has also been my sanctuary.
The house has transformed many of us who have spent time here. Susan, who started her career as a medical social worker, became a spiritual director within these walls, and for years has used the space to guide the spiritual growth of others. She has always been my guide in this realm, and it is in this house that some of the major shifts in my work, my personal world, and my spiritual life started to take form. It is a home, but in so many ways it remains a chapel still.
Last year my friend invited me to stay in “Church House” for a week of each month when she goes to her second home in California. I love my tiny studio apartment, which represents who I am and how my soul expresses herself at the present: small, awake in my aloneness, simple, quiet.
But each month, as my week in the church gets closer, I find myself readying for it as I would for a spiritual retreat. I choose books from my shelf to accompany me – almost always aimed at self-reflection or at quenching spiritual thirst. And I look forward to scouring Susan’s bookshelves. As a spiritual director she has collected so many powerful, intriguing books about the self, the sacred, and the spiritual, that I feel bathed in metaphysical waters just sitting near them.
The day before I head to Susan’s, I pack a bag with my most comfortable clothes, plain and loose and warm. They are necessary for curling up in the big purple reading chairs that sit where I like to imagine a choir loft would be if this house were to suddenly return to official chapeldom. The library loft is the place I give myself the gift of getting lost in thought for a little while or a long one. In truth, the lofts in the house were added well after the chapel’s 1953 desanctification. Back then, churchgoers entered into a soaring spiritual space under a ceiling 27 feet in height. Stil, even though the loft did not exist when the parish was here, I still hear choirs in my mind's ear.
As I prepare to retreat, I collect all the fruits and vegetables from my refrigerator, throw out the junk food I’ve collected, and look forward to a week of comforting soups, teas, and homemade dishes. I strive for simple, whole, and organic. In a way, these are the foods that feed how I feel or want to feel: simple, whole, authentic, comforted.
In the old oak floors I feel the memory of years of gathering and prayer, and I see the marks of decades of dinners and Easter celebrations and weddings. Sitting on the living room couch I imagine the pew that used to sit right here and the people who sat upon it.
There have been times when plants from outside sneak up and under the pebbled stained glass window frames as if they know they will find sanctuary inside and they won’t be harmed. In my imagination, my sweet friend hires a gardener to carefully untangle them from the house and replant them in the church yard out back.
I like to sit on the altar steps, which are the same as the day the church was built but now lead up into the kitchen, and remember those zealous days of my youth when I thought for sure I should be a priest or a nun. I imagine standing in front of this stage to take or give communion or facing toward the altar listening to a sermon. Or standing there, giving one. Sometimes I place Susan in the background of these images, beating eggs in the blender in preparation for making her delicious breakfast muffins.
I sleep in the sacristy -- the place where a priest would prepare for the Mass or the service of Holy Eucharist. I feel all the blessings and incantations uttered within these walls deep in my bones. I feel them in the wood and in the brick of the fireplace and in the hungry center of my soul. The words, long gone from this room, feel alive in the air and when I breathe them in I know that the god of my understanding is present.
The house is made of exposed wood beams and floor to ceiling windows. There is a skylight at one end. It does not face the sun. Throughout the day its essence shifts between dark and light, shadow and luminance. I find myself following these transitions as they move a day forward in angles from skylight to floor, window to ceiling. I love to sit in those purple chairs and watch the light shifting through the wide open space of the church, or watch the sun go down on the magnolia tree just outside. I have watched the seasons arrive on that tree for more than 20 years.
No matter where my eyes land in Susan’s house, they find reminders of the work of spiritual questing and of the myths and traditions that many faiths offer to ease our fear and longing with hope. There are icons and candles, statues of spiritual leaders, images of the Virgin Mary, artworks that while non-specific in their imagery absolutely stir the soul.
Not long ago, Susan noticed a rust stain on the wood-burning stove in the center of the sanctuary space which is now the living room. Water had overflowed from a potted plant. When I looked at the stain I laughed out loud. It was a perfectly formed Virgin Mary holding the earth. While we did not call the Vatican, we didn’t scrub it away either.
For much of my life, I looked for god in organized religion, in community spirituality, in yoga, in ancient holy places I traveled a long while to get to. Sadly, I never felt truly safe or at home in any of these places, never fully myself, never sure of the holy. I often felt I must earn my belonging. Eventually I retreated from that unfruitful wandering.
I did not, however, discard my search for god. And, I imagine god has continued to search for me.
I am here now, in the house that was a church. I’m sitting under it’s dark wood beams. The sun is setting, the light dimming. The dog is snoring on the couch. The space calls for candles and so I have lit them all around in response. I sink deep into a feeling of peace. I realize what I’ve been given and am so grateful for this gift:
That once a month I move into a house of god, a place where nothing is expected of me but that I sit in the light and the dark of this physical and spiritual space and feel that invisible hand pulling me in the grace of both directions.
Sanctuary: a place safe where all of me is welcome, respected, equitable, celebrated.
Soul: essence, inner guide, the immaterial portion of my existence, the lens of my seeing, where intuition lives, where I don’t need to see to believe.
Sacred: of god, blessed, holy, that which I hold dearest, filled with immaterial spirit, a place of deep meaning, symbolism, heart
Safe: Sureness, non-harmful, protected from objects operated, demanded, or manipulated by others to meet their own objectives or in reaction to their own fears.
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