ORAL CATHEDRAL

The following is an excerpt from my book about creating oral spaces for healing:

“A cathedral is entered through gigantic doors. They are far taller and wider than one person would need to enter. They are doors created with size, welcoming all who come to enter. Their size is invitational, not demanding. One has a choice—to enter and be swallowed by shadowed mystery or turn and retreat.

Through these vast doors, a whole community—stranger and friend, alien and enemy—gathers in the presence of a mystery grand beyond each and all. A cathedral is a space where light and shadow wrestle on the floor, where knowing and unknowing play tag among the pews. A cathedral is not a space where color and light are fixed and unchanging. It is a place where light pierces color and creates changing images in the air. Colors tumble over each other in a kaleidoscopic delight.

Cathedrals create a space in which the soul’s cacophonous voices can be drawn out into a safe space. They create stimuli to seduce the words from the depth of the repressed and controlled world in which many live and encourage them to center around a mysterious reality of grace and mercy. Cathedrals create communities whose character is formed by the space.

A cathedral is a space where words are bathed in beauty, and language is laced with incense. It is a place where music reaches beyond the heights and below the depths. It houses fire that flickers, casting its heat to warm cold hearts and its light to illumine the frightening dark.

A cathedral is also a place where time has an eternal quality. It is a place where the immediacy of urgent time is stretched into the expanse of timeless time. It is a place where time reaches back through the ages in memory and stares ahead into eternal wondering. A cathedral is a place where there is time to wander through the stained-glass stories, allowing ourselves to be stained by their humanity and divinity. It is a place where ordinary people seem to dance from the windows with a quality of illuminating saint-like life.

How does preaching create an oral sanctuary? How do we speak so that there is a sanctuary space in which the listeners might move without fear? How do we speak to create space between the tongue and the ear so that the spirit might have room to embrace both?”

For more about the creating an oral cathedral, you may download my book Healing Relationships: A Preaching Model FREE at www.danmoseley.com.

BREATHING SPACE

In the novel, Middlesex by  Jeffrey Eugenides , a young woman has run away from home. She reports that her parents wait by the phone to get word of her, but they are afraid that they might hear that she has died. They are ambivalent about picking up the phone because "ignorance seemed preferable to grief."

There are times in our lives that knowing the truth about an ending is difficult to hear. We need some protection from the truth because once we know that loss is real, we have to grieve.  And grieving is hard.  It takes lots of work and exhausts us.  Learning to live without someone or something that has been important to our self-understanding requires attention and internal negotiation to determine how to live a new way.

Sanctuary is important. Each of us has to deal with the truth in our own time and our own way.  Denial may not be a healthy way to deal with endings, but it can be a safe place to retreat to at times. To consider all the implications of a significant loss takes time and strength. We need spaces in our lives when we can breath and rest.  The unrelenting truth of loss can wear us down unless we have space where we can rest and renew our strength.

If you know someone who struggles to deal with the end of the way the world was, be graceful with them. Know that sometimes they need to just be held and not wrestle with reality all the time. Be a sanctuary for them and allow your presence to be a sabbath space.  They will return to the struggle with truth when they have the strength.