Blue Star Memorial Highway

It struck me somewhere between Ellsworth and Bar Harbor, Maine that I was never going to find a better church than this one. What other church had such imposing walls, such a high ceiling, this kind of lighting, such grand music and preaching? And the variety in its many locations—I could feel at home in this church on Mount Desert Island, along the Columbia River gorge or a deserted stretch of highway in eastern Washington, in the flatlands of Texas, a tallgrass prairie in Kansas, or on the dark edge of Eminence, Missouri at dusk.

On this weekend trip, I could almost have marked our passing from one state to another by the type of churches crowding the highways—nearly all Catholic churches from suburban Boston to the northern Massachusetts border, a mix of Catholic and Protestant, including a variety of evangelical churches, in New Hampshire, and Baptist churches in increasing numbers as we drove further along coastal Maine. This kind of territorial demarcation based on Christian denomination is not by itself unusual—“The South” is delineated by Southern Baptist churches practically as much as it is by state borders, and Methodist churches in North Carolina are nearly as plentiful as mile markers. This was striking only in the sense that I was not looking for such a contrast; rather it found me.

Places of worship define, limit, and divide/set against/polarize—you choose the verb—human beings. In some ways they also define and limit God, or YHWH, or Allah, or the particular deity being worshipped within their walls. Inside a place of worship, God is made to fit into a certain definition based on the belief structure of those present within that place. Outside that place, God is not, as the cliche goes, in a box.

The struggle to come to grips with this idea is titanic for those who truly seek to know God—or at least to know as much of God as we are given to know in this life. We are challenged in scripture not to forsake the meeting together of us who seek and worship, yet we know that God is so great, so immense, so beyond our comprehension that God cannot be contained by the walls of our minds any more than by the walls of buildings. The nature of God—even trying to talk about it makes clear that the weighty idea cannot be grasped in full.

Over and over scripture makes clear that God is greater than our cognitive abilities, even while speaking of God’s wings, eyes, arms, breath. Read Job, or Psalms, for examples. We are finite and cannot fully conceive of God. It is an act of mercy that those who wrote down their thoughts and conceptions of God used points of reference to which we can relate, for the most part.

Deep

To stand
on a spit of broken rock,
wind like an open hand
across an inland face,
hearing the whipcrack of waves,
the rush of gulls, a spate of wings,
the tenor of a lonely place—
this is something good and something great.

To know
every drop of brine
as a remnant of God, and
every fold and flow
of the ocean,
every taste of sand
and salt as bread and wine,
is to know devotion,
to be Elijah, buoyed along
by the strong water and wind,
the wild horses of the sea
dashing ahead
and laughing to me.


© 2005 J. Mark Reimer

Stella Maris

My father was stationed in New London, Connecticut for a time during his days in the United States Navy. Knowing this, and eager as I always have been to seek out connections with him, I ventured into the seacoast town while staying nearby for a wedding. Down near the water I saw a curious blend of newly renovated historic homes and dilapidated buildings, glitzy new shops and dingy storefronts. I also saw something that captured my imagination.

Standing in front of a granite-grey cathedral from an earlier time was a sign that read Star of the Sea. What a descriptive phrase, I thought. I wasn't familiar with the name, but I wanted to know more about its origin.

So I looked in books, asked around. I dug. And what I discovered was more beautiful even than the phrase itself.

It’s commonly believed that the appellation “Star of the Sea,” or “Stella Maris,” came from St. Jerome. Some claim that this is untrue, that actually he wrote “stilla maris,” a drop of the sea and that apparently a later scribe either mistranslated or “corrected” Jerome, in the process leaving behind an enduring phrase. Many early church fathers referred to the mother of Jesus in this way, including Alcuin and Isidore of Seville (you may know the latter as the patron saint of the Internet!)

In the ninth century a French Benedictine monk named Paschasius Radbertus wrote this:
Mary Star of the Sea must be followed in faith and morals lest we capsize
amidst the storm-tossed waves of the sea. She will illumine us to believe in
Christ born of her for the salvation of the world.

And Bernard of Clairvaux encouraged those tempted and struggling with sin to “look to the star, call on Mary.”

In other words, all the properties that we associate with stars we also attribute to this beloved woman. Something in human nature requires a cynosure, a guide; we know that our sense of direction is fallible. We want to be able to look up through stormy skies and see a light piercing through and illuminating a way that is right. (Where that light leads—that one is up to you.) Without a lodestar, we feel completely vulnerable. Ever been lost—I mean really lost—in the woods? If so, you have known the universal human need for guidance.

We are not navigators, now. In many ways we are adrift, having lost any real connection with land, water, wind. In the time of Radbertus sailors navigated by means of the stars, so the phrase “Star of the Sea” had real meaning. Most of us could not find our way with a map and compass, much less by dead reckoning.

I don’t mean to suggest that the kind of connections mentioned above are the destination. They cannot be recaptured in the same sense as in past centuries, and perhaps this is not even desirable. I don’t believe that “Nature” equals God. God the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts that we see with the naked eye.

But these are footprints. Traces. Signposts that say someone has been here. Someone left this for me.

St. John's Chapel, 2001

They’ve torn up the lawn hard by the chapel. One week ago, between the rose windows of the old fieldstone church and the bleak façade of the dormitory stretched a beautiful greenspace that drew the scene together. Apparently water had been leaking into the chapel and staining its white walls.

Maybe the problem is poor construction; the church itself was put up in the late 1800s, practically yesterday compared to many of the houses and other buildings in this part of Cambridge, Massachusetts. So now, as I take the shortcut to work through this divinity school’s campus, I am confronted with a forlorn sight: the familiar statue of a penitent, hands clapped to the head in supplication, has been moved from its spot in a tree-enclosed enclave and is standing next to a power shovel and a temporary chain-link fence.

In place of the cropped green grass is hard-packed dirt, criss-crossed by scars from the treads of heavy machinery. Passing by this sight, I feel a strange twinge. The thought occurs to me: I hope they’re going to restore that space somehow. Before, the lawn seemed a natural extension of the chapel itself, as if the two were linked together; it was a joyful place that made me think of William Blake’s “ecchoing green” when I passed by. Now, even the church, a place to worship God, seems duller, more profane.

Why should that be? We live in an era of sterilized buildings and climate control. Our cars, parked in dry, warm garages, wait for us to climb in and open the door with one press of a button. We turn on the defroster and punch another button for the heated seats as we drive away. When we arrive at church, we drive under the carport to drop off our passengers so that they won’t get wet. We look for the closest possible parking space, turn off the ignition, and raise a golf umbrella with yet another flick of a button.

Once inside, perhaps the temperature is slightly too warm or too cool. Maybe the cushioned seats feel a little hard. We might be tempted to grumble about the slick tiles in the entryway that the no-slip rug didn’t cover.

We listen to the homily. State-of-the-art amplification is in place so that we don’t have to strain to hear. Not to worry if we miss a critical point: a projection system beams the sermon’s outline onto large screens descending from the sanctuary’s ceiling. A glossy bulletin advertises upcoming events, in case we missed the announcements.

We build churches that look like shopping malls and go to malls that function as secular churches. Our places of worship are “physical plants” that look a good deal like self-contained worlds surrounded by fences and gates. We can be “in the world but not of it” to our hearts’ content, we tell ourselves with satisfaction.

So if we have all this, what does one meager green lawn beside a leaky old chapel matter? I wonder this as I walk past the scarred earth, and then it hits me: I had felt the presence of God just as powerfully on a bright early summer morning, getting the cuffs of my pants wet with dew that reflected the sun, in that little space in the middle of a city, as I had sitting in chapel services inside the church.

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