Holy Ground

Fishtrap Creek in the rain. Lynden, WA. November 25, 2024. (Photo by Mavis Moon.)

I have a friend who is a pastor. He told me that his son accuses him of “Christianizing” everything (although I don’t think that’s the word he used). The son teases his dad that he makes every event and observance into a sermon lesson, ties everything to a Bible story, or somehow turns every event and observance into something about God.

I tend to do that, too. The other day, as I watched a creek run by, I mused at how our lives are like that: present in front of us and moving past, and God is with us, ahead of the next curve, all around us. As I walked this morning, I heard the whoosh sound of my sleeve brushing against my corduroy jacket. It reminded me of hearing that whistling whoosh all around me during winter days when I was in college in Michigan—and how God walks with me every step of the way, with every whooshing whistle sound of my swinging arm as I walk. Yesterday, in his sermon, our pastor talked about a “Word-saturated life.” I guess this tendency to turn everything into a God-reference is a part of that.

Have you heard of Brother Lawrence?** He is the paragon of a Christ-centered life. He did everything as a way of worship—whether it was washing the dishes, sweeping, or just answering the door of his monastery. The story goes that when he heard someone at the door, he would call out, “I’m coming, Jesus.”

I like the thought that we are always walking on holy ground, as Brian Doyle writes below. One of my favorite ways to put myself into God’s presence with my imagination is to imagine being like Moses, walking along, seeing a burning bush that strangely wasn’t burning up, stepping off the path to check it out, and hearing God say, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”*** As I walk through life, God is not always telling me to “take off my sandals,” but I’m walking on holy ground, nonetheless.

You, too, are walking on holy ground. Jesus is walking beside you every step of the way. You are surrounded by his love.

washed clean****
by Brian Doyle

“The rain is raining all around, it falls on field and tree, it rains on the umbrellas here, and on the ships at sea,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson of the Scottish rain, a century ago. Here in the Far Corner the autumnal rains have begun to spill from the sky, and water sluices over land and people, cleansing both, reminding us that we begin in water, are baptized by water, are composed of water. Water is our cousin and our cousin is back in town, his burbling visit forcing us back inside house and heart, back to a chair by the fire, back to contemplation of the ways of water in the stories of the Son who came to us.

One turns to Matthew’s Gospel for close accounting of Christ and the waters of the Jordan—waters poured on his brow by a curious and prickly soul so sure that water was the means of salvation that his name has descended to us as John the Baptist. Christ asks John to baptize him with the running waters of a river, that most relentless of scouring creatures.

“I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” asks John, savage and rude John, John who has just baptized Pharisees and Sadducees while audibly gritting his teeth and lashing them with his razor tongue in a speech that begins with “You brood of vipers!” and then gets less polite, John of the “garment of camel’s hair, and a leather girdle around his waist; and his food was locusts and wild honey,” as Matthew reports, ever the careful journalist.

“Let it be so now,” says Jesus equably, “for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” And so on his brow, John pours the waters of the Jordan, the mighty river of Judea.

“And when Jesus was baptized,” writes Matthew, “he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and lo, a voice from heaven, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’

Soaring out the window at the gray corduroy sky, one thinks of that stern Voice falling down in praise upon his Son, and suddenly the rafts of rain do not seem onerous but holy, do not seem an affliction but an extraordinary gift; this is the water of life, and we drink from it so that we may live, in him, with him, until the waters part and there is nothing but Light.

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* Brian Doyle. “A sense of wonder: Remembering Brian Doyle” by James T. Keane, October 10, 2023, America magazine. I blogged about his book One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder and a "proem" (a word he concocted for his writings that are a combination of prose and poetry) he wrote called "Goofing the Angel."

** Brother Lawrence. Heroes of the Faith: Brother Lawrence by Canon J. John.

*** Moses and the burning bush. Exodus 3.

**** from leaping | Revelations & Epiphanies by Brian Doyle. Loyala Press, copyright 2013, 2003. Page 56.