Morning Meditation

"A sacred space is not a luxury item, but rather a response to a basic human need. In addition to food, shelter, and clothing, humans naturally crave and require beauty in their lives as a matter of survival. Beauty, which is made accessible to us in sacred spaces, elevates our gaze to see that there is a deeper dimension to our lives than what appears on the surface. Sacred spaces allow us to locate the divine in our midst."
- article from the Catholic Extension Society, which helps repair and rebuild church structures

Welcome (Rev. Danielle Garrett)

I am delighted today to welcome you and then go sit down in the pews myself, because today’s service is really special. Many of you know that starting this summer and going through November, the church is open on weekends for self-guided tours. While tours here are not new, this particular configuration is- with these really wonderful museum quality displays that allow visitors to explore at their own pace and really absorb our fascinating history, the good and the bad and everything in between. I’m so impressed by the dedication, time, and talents of the team that has put this together and the volunteers who staff it every weekend. If you’ve been part of the tour efforts, would you stand up or raise your hand so we can recognize and thank you?

It’s a gift to our neighbors and visitors that they can experience the rich history and the beauty of this sacred space in this way. And it’s wonderful for the church! It’s exciting to have people visiting and seeing what we’re all about, and of course it is a great fundraising effort and for that we are all grateful. But today I invited us to explore these tours beyond their promise of income. We aren’t a museum. We are a working church.

A living and vibrant faith community that is trying to make sense of its history, chart a new future, and care for one another in the beautiful, broken present. So it is a strange thing to invite folks into this space. It can be emotional. I know that as the team prepared the materials, they did their own wrestling with our complicated history and reflected on what it means to be a member of this community today, and inheritors of that complicated history. I know some of you have rolled your eyes when you heard visitors ask, “What year was the last service held here?” as you were preparing to greet and worship with your friends on homecoming Sunday. You all have laughed and cried in these pews, dedicated babies and raised children. Gotten married, mourned love ones, tried to make sense of national tragedies and asked questions about the meaning of life and the nature of God. So it’s vulnerable and tender to say to a bachelorette party in witch hats, “Come into this sacred place and have a look around and post selfies on instagram!” And I want us to lean into this complexity and see what’s there to discover, not just financially but spiritually.

So today, as we continue to explore the theme of “tending sacred space” I’ve invited a few members of the church to take the pulpit and share what it means to them to open this sacred space to visitors in this way. As we listen, I invite you into this exploration of history and memory, of the power of built sacred spaces and the energy they hold, of what it means to be part of a living tradition that stretches back nearly 400 years.

Reading: Church Basement by Maureen Ash

Reflection (Tiffany Magnolia)

As some of you might know, I am trained in the literature of the post-colonial period, roughly 1950 to the present. However, I specialize in what is called the “Black Atlantic.”

This means that I have to know about how and why folks came to uncharted places to assert their dominion and why folks were then forcibly transported to enact that dominion for roughly the last 400 years. It is an odd sort of combination, you see.

Knowing the ideologies written into stories that show up in a new location helps to give life to those who undertook this quest. But it also means seeing the fractures in logic that show up in storytelling, knowing that persecution in one location as a reason to flee to the other did not mean freedom from persecuting others. Colonies are a messy business, making manifest social and ideological tensions in the places from which they are launched. They are a site of dislocation, but also a site of promise, of potential. Let’s call them an “experiment” without a solid end point.

It is this training that made me ask the question of the Deacons, “Were the first members of the First Church all from the same place and congregation (s) back in England, or were they a heterogenous group?” We hear much about the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, about how living in the Netherlands didn’t suit this close knit group, but was our group similarly close knit? Were they a community in England before they were a community in New England? When they started this church, were they united in anything?

The answer is both simple and complicated and it gets at the heart of what I want to talk about today, about how sacred space has a place like no other in our lives. No, they didn’t know one another prior to coming to Naumkeg as part of the New England Company’s Massachusetts Bay Colony, but yes, they were all Puritan. That is, in order to shore up the finances of the company (because let us never forget that there is always a financial aspect to colonialism, no matter how ideological), company officials set out to populate this place with a purpose and a specific demographic in mind.

Let me read a short passage from the Records of the First Church in Salem :

The purpose of the Massachusetts Bay Company under its royal charter was to plant a colony in New England which should be a refuge for English Puritans increasingly threatened in their religious practices by the efforts of the bishops of the Church of England to enforce uniformity in the Church. To secure substantial support, the Company was organized as a joint-stock company in which wealthy Puritan landowners and merchants were urged to invest both for profit and as a religious duty. Since religion had a primary place in this colonial enterprise, provision for the worship of God in accordance with Puritan beliefs was essential to the Company’s plans. Accordingly, The First Church in Salem was instituted on August 6, 1629.

So the folks who founded our church were wealthy. They were used to a standard of living by 17th Century measures that can only be described as “comfortable.” At risk for them in England were their religious practices, not their livelihoods. So, 200 men, women, and children, none of whom were farmers (remember they were land owners, which in England meant having tenant farmers on whom your fortunes were built) or tradespeople (merchants sold, they didn’t make) set up a town and church in a place that went beyond the boundaries of imagination in terms of its wildness, its novelty, and its difficulty. These are the folks that started our church, folks that left literally everything they understood about the world because their faith called them to practice it in a certain way.

The first members of this church were “dislocated,” in every possible way except one: their spiritual beliefs and practices. They didn’t know each other, they didn’t know how to live in this environment, and they certainly didn’t enjoy any of the comforts they had grown accustomed to over their lives. However, they felt compelled to create sacred space together. That’s it. That was the only terra firma on which they left. They could have their own church and be free from the church of England. Otherwise, everything else was up in the air.

This early history is interesting, but it seems actually to be the story of this church continually. We have not ever been homogenous, and we are not now. We are called to be here, sometimes by forces we can’t articulate, to show up for one another and ourselves, in an often dislocated state. I know that I was by my ineffectual efforts to reconcile Catholic spirituality with Catholic dogma (fun fact, they are incompatible at best). I also know that when the 2016 election happened, church was one of the only places I felt on solid footing. I don’t know that I can sum up all the ways that it has been my most solid “location” in moments of dislocation, but I know it has meant this to many of you, too. It has been my greatest honor that you share these stories with me when I stand in the pulpit and offer up my efforts to keep this wonderful experiment going. All of us have come from somewhere to end up here, united by faith and this idea of a community founded on faith.

And that is really the moral of this story. Our service today is one more moment in this long history, this long experiment which asks: can creating sacred space together be enough in a world of complete dislocation? We have weathered challenges in the far distant and not so distant past as a church community, but they have all revealed that for many of us, maybe even the majority of us, it is more than enough.