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

"Lo, I am with you always"
means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking.
Rumi, thirteenth century

We almost forgot that conversation in the pressure of unpacking and assembling enough clean clothes to get Donn off to first grade, Scott to fourth. But on Sunday, an overcast, drizzly September morning, we drove past the statue of Chief Kisco and pulled into the parking lot of what turned out, indeed, to be St. Mark's Episcopal Church.

There were just the two of us, the children after the long separation from friends being inextricable from various neighborhood homes. We followed a stream of dauntingly well-dressed people through a small stone anteroom and a wood-paneled vestibule, into a dimly lit sanctuary.

I was looking down at my travel-weary blue skirt and wishing I'd worn my best shoes even if they hurt, when I glanced up and stopped short.

I was staring at a bit of medieval England. From where I stood, the center aisle led past thick stone pillars to a magnificent carved-wood screen. The aisle continued through the screen, up three stone steps, past some choir stalls, and up still more steps to a stone altar. In Aunt Helen's Unitarian church, the central aisle ended at an imposing pulpit. But in this Gothic gem, the aisle led to that altar. And in the center of the altar was a golden cross.

John was gesturing to me and I realized I was blocking the doorway. We slid into the last pew, safely near the exit. A lady in a stylish black straw hat sat down next to me, pulled a maroon velvet cushion from beneath the pew in front of us, and dropped to her knees. With some apprehension I saw that every single person, on arriving, did the same, kneeling for a moment with bowed head.

And still my eyes kept tracing that route down the middle of the room, through the carved screen, past the choir stalls ... On that rainy fall morning the rest of the church was a shadowy place of gray stone, the brightest spot, the focal point, that gleaming cross. What are you going to do about me? it seemed to ask. Either what happened on the cross is central, or it makes no difference at all.

The question didn't come to me that crisply that day. I only knew that the architecture of this church was speaking to me as words never had.