By Heidi Shott
Each evening, until my twin sons were ten or so, I gathered with them at bedtime to say our “thank you” prayers, which ended with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. One night after the Amen and the last ten kisses of the day, I began to tiptoe out when a seven year-old head popped over the top of the upper bunk.
“What is it, dude?” I asked, tired and ready for a few, yawny hours in grown-upland.
“Whoever wrote that last prayer was a chump,” said Colin. A barky laugh escaped me. Never before had the words Jesus and chump come together in my mind.
“Jesus made up that prayer. You think Jesus is a chump?”
“Well, Mom, how can things possibly be the same on earth as they are in heaven?” I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recount the answer I gave. In fact I don’t really remember what I said, but I do remember the question. On some level it’s one I ask myself every day.
On a recent Friday, after lying awake for 30 minutes, I turned to my alarm clock to discover it was 4:30 a.m. I’d been thinking about 53 different things I had to do. Rather than do any of them, I put a sweatshirt over my pajamas and set off for a walk around my neighborhood.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, early settlers here saw the value of the setting and set up a mill at the head of a tidal river along the coast of Maine. Our small village of colonials and capes grew up along the millpond at the base of the lake that pours into the salt river below.
As I ventured into the early morning, the alewives had begun the day’s run up the fish ladder on the other side of the millpond. Gulls, osprey and cormorants were fishing for breakfast, making noise and swooping low across the water.
“Pretty nice,” I sniffed to myself as I walked across the bridge that separates the lake from the pond. I was too deeply engaged in thinking about the logistics and politics of Thing-To-Do #14 to be moved by any early morning beauty.
But as I rounded a corner and a vast field of lupine unfolded with the head of the river in the distance, God got me at last. And I thought suddenly that the answer to Colin’s long-ago question lay in a moment like this.
Earth is like heaven when you can recognize God’s grace in the midst of the most stressful week. A line from a song by the Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn buzzed in my head: “One moment you’re waiting for the sky to fall; the next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all.”
My pace slowed. Mist rose from the bay and I gave the geese and their goslings that stake claim to the roadway at the lower end of the Mills wide berth. At the top of the dam, I stopped to see how many alewives had made their way to the last barrier before the lake, their spawning ground. From there I completed the circle back home by trespassing on hydro company land and into my own backyard. My sneakers were wet with dew and spider webs in the tall grass shown in sparkles as the sun began to rise.
As I approached the back of my house, I thought of my sweet menfolk still deeply asleep, my husband, those boys – now teenagers in the prime of their sleeping years. None of my 53 Things-To-Do seemed quite so important, even though about 40 of them involved the Diocese of Maine.
My reclaimed calm wasn’t about church or work or anything remotely Episcopal. It was about God’s loving voice saying, “Here it is. Here it’s always been. Here it will be. All of it, for free.”
By the time I made my way up the hill to the kitchen, the early light revealed a fine day ahead. I turned on my computer and did 12 or 15 things before it was time to make lunches and whisper, “good morning,” in everyone’s ear.
May God’s kingdom come that way more often.
*Title from Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.” http://cockburnproject.net
Heidi Shott is Canon for Communications and Social Justice in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.