Our sanctuary is so exquisitely beautiful in all its simplicity, and not just because of those who fill the pews, but because of the LIGHT ! O, the light that comes through the windows ! the LIGHT ! the different colours and strengths of light as it travels by each window throughout the calendar year. the LIGHT ! the light as it kisses the flowers about the altar, as it lands on loved ones, sifts through the smoke from our incense, that smoke which symbolizes our prayers rising before God.
During The Contemplative Gaze on Saturday I realized how many hours I've spent on the altar as thurifer these last 20 years. During The Great Thanksgiving, the thurifer centers herself on the columbarium side of the altar, lined up in the Chihuly window behind the pulpit on the Epistle Side. The design of that famed window echos the other windows, but its center panels are no longer a not-quite-solid-mliky-undulating glass, but ones of different colors and patterns.
Mother Posey leading us (gorgeously, of course), remarked that the swirls around the perimeter of the window reminded her of The Galaxy, and I shared that I always feel like those are the eyes of the souls of all who have gone before us ...
you know, the spirits of every person who has ever been a part of that sanctuary is everywhere you look, whether that person has passed on to That Heavenly Country, or whether they're in the Columbarium or if they're just living in West Virginia ... once you've been among us, you remain there in the eye of our heart.
I remembered when my husband and I went to the natural history museum the summer of 2019. We watched THE DARK UNIVERSE in the planetarium and they told us:
<< [T]here’s no center to the universe. An observer in ANOTHER galaxy would see the same evidence of cosmic expansion as we do.
So would observers in that galaxy there,
or this galaxy over here. **
Wherever you are observing from in the Universe, the Universe looks as if you’re at the center and everyone else is speeding away. ** //
How big is it? Our observable universe is limited to the part of the cosmos from which light has reached us here on Earth.
But every galaxy occupies the center of its own observable universe.
Observers in that distant galaxy [hundreds of light years away from us] can see light from regions we cannot yet see [because the light from them has not yet stretched across time to reach us]. And we can see regions they cannot see [because the light has reached us, but still has another hundreds of light years to go before it reaches them].
So no matter who or where you are, you’ll reach the same conclusion — that the universe as a whole must be bigger than the part of it you can perceive.
How much bigger? Some scientists speculate that if the observable universe were the size of a planetarium dome, the entire universe would be larger than planet Earth—others suggest it may be infinitely large.
Clearly there’s more to the universe than meets the eye. The Big Bang happened long ago but not far away. It happened here, there, and everywhere.
Peering into the dark, we stand on the threshold of great discoveries — and we always will, as long as we keep looking up … and exploring. > >
Our troubles are big maybe because our hands holding them are small. If we can let go of our troubles and give them back to the universe, the universe can help us by swallowing them up. The universe is in us, and surrounds us, and wants us to be well, and lets us know that together, as co-creators, we're big after all. Selah. xoxo
Quote from The Dark Universe, Planetarium, AMNH --> https://youtu.be/pOxG4aSQOO8
~ photo by Vince Chiumento, October 26, 2016
https://contemplativegaze.org/
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