Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Heaven, now there's a thought. Nothing has ever been able, ultimately, to convince me we live anywhere else. And that heaven, more a verb than a noun, more a condition than a place, is all about leading with the heart in whatever broken or ragged state it's in, stumbling forward in faith until, from time to time, we miraculously find our way ....

It is laughter, I think, that bubbles up at last and says, "Ho, I think we are there." And that "there" is always here.

Alice Walker

Looking back on that rainy September Sunday today, more than forty years later, I can only think that God in his mercy worked a very small, very personal miracle on behalf of that pair in the last pew. I believe today in that kind of condescension from the God of the universe. And this belief has been formed and nurtured over the years at that same St. Mark's Church.

That we should have gone there that Sunday, of all days. That Marc Hall, who became a lifelong friend, should have made that particular appeal, and that two hundred people should have been deaf to it, as though God had placed his hands over their ears. These things show me his pursuit of each individual person as though only that one mattered.

John and I, fugitives from fellowshipping Christians, running scared of people with designs on our souls, made the acquaintance of this God Sunday after Sunday in that stone-pillared space where God permitted no one to invite us to a church supper, no one to ask me to sew, no one to speak to us at all.

As agreed, we didn't speak about these Sunday mornings to each other either. For me it was a week by week discovery of the mesh between me and a particular church tradition. From stories I'd worked on, I knew that such meshes existed. The inner-city kid reached by a tough-talking street preacher. The businessman responding to the workplace language of Norman Vincent Peale.

But that God should have a way to connect with me too - that was the wonder of St. Mark's. First of all, there was a book to hold. As I learned to find my way around in the Book of Common Prayer, I began to grasp what a treasure chest of many centuries' devotion it is. But it wouldn't have mattered, to start with, what was between its covers. Any book, for me, was security.

And the language of this particular book! Much of the English in that 1928 edition dated back to Shakespeare's day - and I'd been a Shakespeare major.