Lent 5: The Rafters

I have a thing for churches!

Big or small, I enter them with eyes and heart wide open, trying to take in the space and feel what makes it sacred. In one of my favorite churches, and enormous cathedral in London, I remember looking up in the rafters and thinking I could see clouds. Maybe it was incense smoke from a past service, but I stared up at the rafters wondering what else was floating around up there. Were the words of sermons delivered long ago up there? What about hymns sung by people who live no more? Are the prayers offered – both aloud and silent – swirling up in the rafters? I don’t know, but I believe they are. Their echoes can still be heard if we slow down and listen.

I believe more and more that, like churches, we, too, have rafters. Into them go every experience we’ve had, everything we’ve been taught, and every prayer we’ve offered. If we take the time and look up into the rafters of our hearts and listen, we will hear voices from those who have long since passed. We can feel experiences, both pleasant and difficult, as if they happened moments ago, and we can see how the prayers we offered long ago sound hauntingly familiar to those we offer today.

The little boy playing with his dog in the backyard is up there in the rafters, so is the boy awkwardly making his way through high school and college. The working man, still wet behind the ears, is there, as is the bewildered father holding his newborn child. We often think such moments are a thing of the past but listen to the elderly woman at the nursing home who calls out to her husband and speaks as if they’re having their first dance at their wedding fifty-six years ago. The rafters hold everything, and sometimes they reveal their secrets through a dramatic event, a subtle touch, smell, or forgotten melody.

Lent is a season of reflection, and it seems a fitting time to pause and look up into our rafters. There’s no better time to listen for the voices of our past, the emotions we thought had disappeared with the seasons, and the people we once were. In them are the experiences had, songs sung, and prayers offered.

The least we could do is listen.