"I am a little church..." ~ August 30th

Ahh! I am amazed at what lovely weather we keep having here in Germany! Hilary and I got up and walked downtown for church this morning at Marienkirche, one of the Protestant churches here in Reutlingen. We had gone to an organ concert there the previous night and learned about its history in our tour of downtown. Its architecture is impressively Gothic and the stained glass is in really good condition. The concert included the Bach's Brandenberg Concertos and wow. The sound of the organ fills every corner of the naive so you are overwhelmed by its strength and the notes cascade through the air with every measure played. I just sat there in the glossy wooden pews, gazing up at the ceiling frescos and listening to the organ, in musical heaven. After all, it is Bach, in a church, in Germany! Any one of those things is fantastic in and of itself...but together they make quite an experience for a music lover like me. And so some of that feeling lingered in the morning when we were in church, as I lost focus from the sermon, it being difficult to understand with pastor's rapid Schwabisch dialect-thickened speech. So I explored the church with my eyes and in my mind, collected the verses that were written atop the columns and the words of those became more of a sermon to me than any message from the preacher in his draped black robes and solemn face and hands empty of a Bible....it being on the altar area, open but somehow seeming unread. Thus I made my own Church in my own heart and praised God in that way, letting His simple Truth speak to me directly, through His own Word. What a wonderful gift the Bible is!!!

~E

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"i am a little church" by e.e. cummings

i am a little church(no great cathedral)....
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

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