Wednesday July 29, 2020
Gerri Luke
REST
The Church at the End of the Street
As a child, I often needed some time just to be able to think. I desperately needed a quiet, gentle place. For me, that place was the Catholic church at the end of my street. The doors were always open, and, there, I could escape the chaos of home. There, in the empty pews, I was free to rest and to reflect. It was there that I envisioned a better place, a place where no one yelled and no one hurt you, a place where one could find love.
Then life took over as I, as so many adults, began to search, to seek, and to find some purpose. I know I was trying to build that better place I had envisioned. All that movement and change created its own chaos, even as I seemed to be moving forward.
Called to reflect this week, I returned to two works: Harold Kushner’s When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough: The Search for a Life That Matters and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Both authors contend that the primary motivating factor in our lives is the search for meaning. Most of us find meaning in striving toward success - usually defined in career and economic terms. There we think we find how good we are as we test our abilities against others. But then, both authors point out, time becomes a factor.
“Money and power do not”, as Kushner said, "satisfy that unnameable hunger of the soul. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter.”
During a particularly tumultuous time in my life, Pam and I wondered into St John’s on a Christmas Eve. During that evening, I felt that quiet, enveloping spirit of my childhood church at the end of the street. It was as if I were being embraced. Over the years, on holidays and vacations we would return here and always found that same spirit. But life calls us out of the church, and we all head back to reaching, seeking, seeking for what we are not sure. For us, it was returning to Pennsylvania and our careers, until I recently retired, and we moved into our home in Kittery.
I thought I would rest. As any of you who are retired knows well, that is not what most often happens. I guess we still try to test our abilities, to improve our lives, to find purpose. Suddenly, a pandemic turns our world upside down, and we all stop. We are forced to rest and, with rest, to reflect.
While we cannot be in the building, St. John’s or my childhood church at the end of the street, the church can be in us. For all our seeking, for all our reaching, it takes our slowing down, our staying home, our resting to find what we have been searching for. A quiet place at the quiet end of the street where one can reflect, where one can be safe with family. In our homes, we feel that enveloping spirit of St. John’s and its special people, and that spirit helps us find purpose in family, our extended family, those who are most important and encourages us to reach out to those who are most in need within our communities. We simply need to rest, to listen and to reflect.