Daily Reading for September 7
Years after I found my way back to mainstream Protestantism, someone asked what attracted me to the Episcopal Church. With only a moment’s pause I replied, “The wood.”
I am convinced that wood is holy. Cut from living things, it takes on new life when used as beams and columns and pews in traditional church architecture. It is as if the trees continue to grow as they absorb generations of candle smoke, incense, and prayer. The rings no longer measure age. Rather, they measure decades of spirituality and faithfulness. When colored light from stained glass windows falls across this holy patina, the wood itself seems to breathe God’s spirit.
I found God in a building. All Saints shocked my spiritual senses. Wood and windows, icons and organ—it was as if I had stumbled into God’s own house. Here was holiness, robust and physical, passed down through generations. It was the Christian tradition embodied in architecture, music, and liturgy. But it was not a “wooden tradition,” stilted and moribund. Like All Saints’ glowing woodwork, here, tradition was vital, a living thing, crafted in the faithfulness and vision of God’s people, present and past. I felt as if I had stumbled into some great secret world and found the biblical pearl of great price. Although I could scarcely name it myself, I was seeking God, incarnated in dynamic tradition, and God was there at All Saints-by-the-Sea.
From Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community by Diana Butler Bass (Jossey-Bass, 2002).