One of my aims for the now sixteen years that I have kept this blog is to not force an entry. Don’t post for posting’s sake but only when it feels like something wants saying. Sometimes the impetus comes from within me and sometimes it is the universe who presents it.

A short while ago, I happened to catch a most marvelous video by Maria Popova in which she says this: Wonder is the most reliable sanctuary I know. Astounding. And she continues on to speak of sanctuary people and sanctuary spaces that call us to this level of wonder—about ourselves, about others, about creation.

Then about a week later, a friend posed the question, Who or what is sanctuary for you?

Which was followed by a Rachel Held Evans quotation reappearing after four or five years.

We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbours, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions—to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. we come with our differences; be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic. We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale.

Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p. 71

Me? I like the lovely weightiness of finding sanctuary…a settling place—settling, not necessarily sedentary…the place and the people who allow one to Be in their fullness…to come home to self and rest in that freedom and ease of breathing. The places and the people who by welcome and word and the quiet communication of love say Be still and know of the nearness of God. Be at ease and rest.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary of place and person-
neither containing,
neither constraining,
All embracing:
A refuge of perspective
on infinite You.
A new slant of light,
a peripheral humming
toward which I bend in bright fascination
of always and everywhere You;
of the tousled and wild diversity
that is You;

You who named each one,
who claims each one,
who loves and loves again and loves still.
You who know each contour, texture,
and elemental specificity of creation
and calls it all good.
You, whose beckon and draw
is the metronome by which
I rest and journey.
You, the moon and sun alike—
You, whose shadow
is both cross and wing.

Sanctuary people, sanctuary spaces:
both respite and threshold
from the journey and between forgetting and remembering
that you named us Beloved;
that all you made is Blessed;
that this is enough, and we are not alone.

Kimberly M. King