For most of my life, praise seemed like such an other-worldly, churchy thing. Praise lived alongside liturgies and homilies and sacraments. To offer praise seemed more a prescriptive act than an natural one.

But as my faith matured–thanks to incredible mentors and writers–I came to see praise as the  most natural expression of gratitude, of honor and affirmation. My children kid me mercilessly about not waving when I pass them on the highway. What are you doing? Why don’t you ever see us? To which I respond, I’m singing. Sorry, but I can’t sing and wave at the same time. 

Honestly, I’ve had some of my greatest praise moments, alone in the car, singing loudly–and mostly on pitch. Likewise, I’ve had moments that are indelibly etched in my praise memory when I’ve been holding sleeping babies in the middle of the night, looking at the stars in a clear, winter sky, and walking alone.

Several years ago, I co-wrote a song, “Sanctuary of Praise,” for our church praise team. This song, in so many ways, has become a theme song for my life. Here are a few stanzas:

I see God in the smallest things                                                                     in my ordinary days                                                                                 Folding clothes and making beds                                                                     will be my act of praise

As I watch my children sleep                                                                             in the quiet of the dawn                                                                                     Jesus folds us in His arms                                                                                 where we belong

And oh, my Father has come home with me                                                   I’ve invited Him here to stay                                                                           and in this ordinary place                                                                               we’ve made a sanctuary of praise.

In my sanctuary of praise, folding clothes and making beds, making Playdoh animals with my grandchildren, and tooling up the Des Moines River with my husband at the helm of his jon boat are authentic acts of praise.

Just the other night, my father was telling me of a recurrent image he has had since adolescence: Jesus, arms stretched wide open, standing in a field surrounded by workers–gritty, earthy, lost and helpless humans. This, he explained, is a picture of the pre-church Jesus, the Savior who dares to love the unlovable, who dares to live among the dirty and the hopeless. This is the Savior whose sanctuary moves with him into leper colonies, desert places, solitary mountain tops, gutters and back alleys, taverns and soup kitchens, refugee camps and prisons. And this is the Savior whose sanctuary is omnipresent and yet transcendent, earthly and yet holy.

Evangelist Billy Graham writes:

The highest form of worship is the worship of unselfish Christian service. The greatest form of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and helpless.

Billy Graham, like my father, understands that the most sacred music in the sanctuary of praise is the sound of consecrated feet seeking out the lost and the helpless. 

Those who enter the sanctuary of praise may sacrifice, serve, and seek. They might sing mightily or sit quietly awaiting that still small voice. Some may perform simple acts in simple settings, for all praise is worthy praise.

So if you see me driving down the highway, the window open, my left arm dangling in the summer air, most likely I will be singing my praise, lustily, lost in the moment.

My great grandmother’s postage-stamp quilt (bottom) in my granddaughter’s bedroom

In contrast to the sanctuary of ingenuity, we may also take refuge in the sanctuary of everyday use. This is a sanctuary of pragmatism and utility, of ordinary things and days.

When I was teaching college and high school literature courses, I relished teaching Alice Walker’s short story, “Everyday Use.” I remember sitting in my community college office, reading this story for the first time. Wholly oblivious to the fact that there were other colleagues and students around me, I literally shouted, “Amen!” as I reached the end. This story deserves a hearty “Amen”–and more.

Set in the 1960s, Walker’s protagonist is a black mother of two adult daughters, Maggie–who lives at home with her mama–and Dee–who has left for the city and a better life. Early in the story, she describes her protagonist:

In real life, I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather.

Walker’s plot centers on a visit from Dee, who returns to the family home with her boyfriend. Dee, who has renamed herself Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo to honor her new identity, is immediately smitten with the milk churn in her family home. She announces that she will use the top of it as a “centerpiece for her alcove table” and she will think of “something artistic to do with the dasher.” As she moves through the house, however, she finds something even more desirable than the old milk churn: two old family quilts, a Lonestar pattern and a Walk Around the Mountain pattern. Both are made from pieces of her grandma and grandpa’s clothing, as well as from her great grandfather’s Civil War uniform.

When her mother offers newer, machine-stitched quilts that will “hold up better” and reveals that she has promised these quilts to Dee’s younger sister, Dee/Wangero cries, “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts! She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

To which, her mother responds: “God knows I been saving ’em up long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!”

In the end, the mother snatches the quilts from Dee and places them in Maggie’s lap. She chooses everyday use over decoration, leaving her eldest daughter quiltless and clueless.

Last fall at a church auction, my husband and I bid on, and ultimately bought, an old metal Case tractor–a collector’s item still in the original box–for an amount I will not disclose. (It was for a good cause!) The next morning when we went to pick up our granddaughter for church, Paul presented our grandson with the tractor. Before anyone could say a thing, Paul had removed it from the box and was on the floor, tractor in hand, beckoning Griffin to play.

In the sanctuary of everyday use, pricey collectible tractors are loosed from their precious boxes and, as toy tractors will, take their places among their Dollar Store contemporaries. They are pulled and pushed through sand and dirt, they are forgotten and left in the rain, they are used, and they are loved. Best of all, they are not heralded to be anything more than they were intended to be.

Great grandmother’s china will leave the china hutch in this sanctuary. And though there be chips and cracks, though the painted roses may fade and the cup handles broken, ordinary families will eat their dinners from this china. And their everyday use, like comfort food, will be deeply satisfying.

My great grandmother’s postage-stamp quilt hangs from a small wooden ladder in my granddaughter’s room. But it has been–and undoubtedly will be–used. Its worn edges and faded pastels give testament to a century of use. And if Gracyn uses it to make a tent, to host a picnic for her dolls, or to curl under with a good book, so be it. In the sanctuary of everyday use, this is expected. And applauded.

Painted on stockings during WWII

The scene: two weeks before Christmas, 1988, lunch time

The players: Megan, age 6, Collyn, age 4, and Marinne, age 3 (and me, their mom)

Megan: Mom, you gotta see this! Look what Collyn made!    

Me (standing at the sink, washing dishes): Just a minute .  .  . (this was my stock phrase to buy time)      

Megan: You better hurry before she eats it–            

Me (turning towards the counter where the girls were eating their baloney and cheese sandwiches): I’m coming!

Collyn: (proudly displaying a blue plastic plate with a nativity scene created from white bread, baloney, and processed cheese) Look, I chewed out the whole scene with my teeth!                    

Megan: You can see the little baloney Jesus in the bread manger. And the cheese wisemen can stand up by themselves!  

Marinne: I like it!  

Me (incredulous): Wow.

Collyn: Can we keep it?        

Megan: She means can we spray it with that clear stuff that makes it last. You  know, so we can keep it and put it out at Christmas every year  

Me: We’ll see .  .  . (my other stock phrase to buy time) 

In the sanctuary of ingenuity, a nativity scene chewed lovingly from white bread, baloney and sliced cheese is less a wonder than a challenge. You have the makings of a sandwich that you don’t want to eat: what can you make with it? how can you transform it before our very eyes?

Sometimes ingenuity comes at a moment just like this. You are comfortably sitting in your home (or wherever), and the opportunity for ingenuity arises. So you take it because you want to and because you can. And from these moments, you discover new and more efficient ways to cut your watermelon, to tie a silk scarf, to braid your daughter’s hair, to substitute an ingredient in a recipe you desperately want to make–but for which you lack one crucial ingredient, to decorate a room on a dime, to jimmy-rig a riding lawn mower so it will run again, etc.

But just as often, ingenuity is born from need. Sometimes desperate need. In Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “The Lovers of the Poor,” she writes of the volunteers from the Ladies Betterment League who make their scheduled visits to Chicago’s poor. Having romanticized their mission work and the recipients of their largesse, these volunteers are ultimately appalled at the sights, sounds, and smells they find in the projects:

They have never seen such a make-do-ness as                                                             Newspaper rugs before! In this, this “flat,”                                                                   Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich                                                               Rugs of the morning (tattered, the bespattered. . .)                                                     Readies to spread clean rugs for the afternoon.                                                             Here is a scene for you. 

To be ingenious is to make do in the face of poverty and want, to roll out newspaper rugs for your guests. Depression era survivors used their ingenuity to find countless uses for those ordinary things we unthinkingly throw in the garbage: left-over pieces of aluminum foil, plastic butter tubs and Cool Whip containers, scraps of fabric and automobile parts. During WII, ingenious females drew fine lines up the back of their bare legs to simulate the hosiery that was neither available or affordable. In lean times, all clamor to enter the sanctuary of ingenuity.

  Consider the world’s foremost online sanctuary of ingenuity: Pinterest. Enter this sanctuary and be sorely amazed! You can learn how to become a real-life MacGyver who, armed with a box of paper clips, can save the world–or at least make some cool jewelry. You can make perfect pancakes with a squeeze bottle, organize a drawer of cords with toilet paper tubes, remove a stripped screw with a rubber band, rub deodorant stains out of your clothes using old pantyhose, and unclog a drain with Alka Seltzer and white vinegar. With a little help from your Pinterest friends, your make-do-ness will guarantee you a spot in the ingenuity hall of fame.

For in the sanctuary of ingenuity, a paper clip is never just a paper clip, a cereal box never just a cereal box. That is the beauty of ingenuity: something’s destiny is never bound by its original form or function.

If we can look at a paper clip or a baloney and cheese sandwich with new eyes, why not a struggling student, an aging neighbor, a despairing man, woman, or child? Why not a person–any person? Maybe I will create a Pinterest site for those who want to enter this sanctuary of ingenuity and be just as amazed at the ways in which we can transform our perceptions of those around us.

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. John 16:33

When I hear the word assurance, in most cases today, it is being used in the context of financial, political, or educational assurances. In the sanctuary of assurances, however, blessed is always the context for assurance. Assurance has less to do with the world and much more to do with that which has overcome the world.

For there will be worldly troubles: ordinary and extraordinary troubles, inevitable and unexpected troubles. But just as assuredly as trouble blackens your life, so may peace and comfort lighten and overcome it.

For years, I have taught W. H. Auden’s poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” based–in large part–on Pieter Breughel’s painting, The Fall of Icarus. This is a stunning painting of a sparkling ocean, a luxury liner, a ploughman on a fertile hillside, and–last but not least–Icarus, the boy who dared to fly too close to the sun, which melted the wax holding his feathered wings together.

I remember searching the painting for the boy. Surely, he was the protagonist; surely, Breughel would highlight his fall and subsequent death in the sea. After scanning the painting for minutes, I remember actually gasping aloud when I discovered two small white legs in the bottom left corner of the painting. This, as poet William Carlos Williams later wrote in his poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” was “Icarus drowning.”

This was Icarus drowning? These were the remnants of the boy who once flew gloriously towards the sun, his father in tow? This was the end of a life? Two insignificant legs relegated to the bottom corner of a masterpiece?

As I have grown and matured in my faith, I have often thought of Auden and Breughel, of William Carlos Williams and all those who may have no assurance but the assurance that suffering has a “human position”, that it inevitably occurs when others are immersed in living, uninterested in and unaware of the fact that another’s life was being ravaged.

Musee des Beaux Arts                                                                                                                 W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,                                                                               the Old Masters; how well, they understood                                                                         Its human position; how it takes place                                                                             While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;       How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting                                           For the miraculous birth, there must always be                                                      Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating                                          On a pond at the edge of the wood:                                                                                  They never forgot                                                                                                                     That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course                                                     Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot                                                                                     Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse                   Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.                                                                                   In  Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns                                         Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may                                                   Have the splash, the forsaken cry,                                                                                             But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone                                              As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green                                     Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen                                       Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,                                                                 had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

At this point in my life, I would like to take Auden, Brueghel, and Williams out for coffee. Then, captive in my presence, I would like to say to them: About suffering, you are wrong. There is an assurance, a blessed assurance, that one’s suffering does not define him or her. Nor does it define the world in which we live. 

I remember having to pack my car up to leave my family’s home in Nebraska to return to my life in Wisconsin or Iowa. The night before I would leave was always filled with dreadful anticipation of the moment the following morning when, my car packed and several goodbyes later, I would round the corner and no longer be able to see my home. With assurance, however, I came to dread less, for I knew that my parents would stand outside my home and wave until I was completely out of sight. This assurance carried me to new homes in other states.

As I sit at the bedside of my father, surrounded by my siblings and my mother, I take solace in the blessed assurance of God’s abiding love and comfort. And I take solace in the blessed assurance of the hospice workers and volunteers, of friends who appear with just the right supplies, just the right words, and arms to wrap you in.

And as I watch my parents greet those who have come to see my father, to hold his hand and to tell him how much his work, his very life has meant to them, I am constantly in awe of the assurance they give to each visitor. They blessedly assure each worker, volunteer, and friend that they matter, that they are appreciated and respected. In the sanctuary of this blessed assurance, we momentarily overcome the troubles of this world: cancer, grief, and loss.

We find sanctuary in the assurance of Jesus’s words: Take heart! I have overcome the world. 

American Whimsie Dolls, Zero the Hero and Hedda Get Bedda (circa 1961), proudly displayed in my office

Warning: the pictures you are about to see may be disturbing (or delightful, if you are an oddly whimsical person like me!)

If this initial picture has not yet scared you off, read on and enter the sanctuary of whimsy.

In 1961, the Christmas of my first-grade year, I wanted only one thing for Christmas: Hedda Get Bedda. The American Doll Company produced 17 different styles of the Whimsies from 1960-61. These dolls were marketed to older kids and teenagers (some reports claim they were created for adults). Actually, the American Doll Company produced some winners–cute dolls, that is: Betsy McCall and Tressy. The Whimsies, however, were not company winners for your average doll consumer.

Let’s just say that I was not–nor am not–your average doll consumer. And Hedda Get Bedda is not your average doll (see below!)

The knob on top of her head turns to give you three different faces! Measles face (with a small hole in the mouth to insert the complimentary thermometer), sleeping face (the least offensive, according to my granddaughter), and the smiling face. For an added fee, you could buy the pajama-clad Hedda her own hospital bed. For reasons I cannot begin to explain, Hedda’s hands are claw-like. And her feet? They are much too long for her oddly-shaped body, a body that all 17 Whimsies share. To say that Hedda resembles ET is probably too kind.

My mom gave in–in spite of her reservations and a mother’s desire for Santa to bring an authentically cuter, more loveable doll–and Hedda came to live at 611 West 27th.

I kept Hedda into my adult years but lost her, tragically, in a move. One day, I recounted my Hedda tale to a group of high school students. With limited artistic skills, I attempted to draw her on the white board. As I found myself really getting worked up, I exclaimed, You just can’t believe how unique she really was! (O.K., I was giving Hedda as much credit as I could by using the word unique.)

The next morning, one of my students rushed in and reported that she had found a Hedda Get Bedda on eBay. Although I acted cool, in truth, I could not wait for the school day to end, so I could see if I could score a new Hedda. What I found when I entered the Whimsie world on eBay was nothing short of miraculous. Not only did I find Hedda, but I discovered what I had never known: there were other, more unique Whimsies!  This rocked my world.

And explained why the Whimsie line never really took off. Who would buy their kid a monk doll? A gambler? A wrestler with chest hair? A female astronaut with blue hands and feet? A hillbilly? A cleaning woman?

But I could not resist a Samson the Strong Man with a leopard singlet and a strawberry blonde moustache and chest hair. I became eBay obsessed, bidding and waiting, bidding and waiting, hoping beyond hope to score the rare, but weird Whimsies. At first, my family chided me; later, they flat-out ridiculed me privately and then publicly. Still, I bid on, determined to add to my Whimsie collection. Each day, I gave my students the latest eBay update. In time, when I had collected a slug of Whimsies, they found homes on a shelf in my classroom. (Hey, some rooms have class pets–we had class Whimsies).

When visitors came to our class, their reaction was nothing short of mouth-gaping shock and awe. Having grown accustomed to our Whimsies, my students and I could no longer see their weirdness and regarded them with the respect they clearly deserved. Visitors, however, were left speechless.

The Whimsies stayed in my high school classroom until I left, and they came home with me. During my years of high school teaching, the Whimsies inspired me to pursue more whimsy. I wrote myself letters and had school office-runners deliver them to me at the beginning of class. In these letters, I informed myself of all sorts of things, like the fact that I had been chosen to be a member of the U.S. Women’s Olympic Curling Team. I explained (to myself) that my sweeping skills had been noticed and admired, and that if–a big if–the Women’s Team were to take gold, I would go down in the history books as the oldest U.S. female Olympian.

As these letters would arrive, I would read them–seriously, ceremoniously–and react appropriately with excitement and gratitude. Students who should have known better would be pulled into the narrative, and I would look up to find their wide eyes fixed on me, their better judgement, momentarily, paralyzed.

And then the real whimsy would begin. Students researched curling and began suggesting training routines. When I bought a USA hockey jersey at Goodwill and announced that the Olympic Committee must be serious, indeed, for they had already sent me the curling jersey and were calling me up, the students cheered. And occasionally on slow classroom days, I would strike a curling pose, launching my imaginary curling stone across the terrazzo floor.

In the sanctuary of whimsy, you can imagine yourself into any world, any position you wish. You can spin an outlandish narrative that will only grow with whimsical details. And if others join your whimsy? Well, there is clearly nothing better than this. Whimsy loves company.

In the name of true whimsy, however, I must come clean before I end this post. I never could afford Samson the Strong Man; he was just too pricey. So, I did what any whimsical woman would do: I made my own. I bought another, less rare Whimsie (a well-loved doll with little hair left and magic markered-up), bought some doll hair, and whipped up my own Samson. He looks better than the original because I gave him a double-dose of chest hair.

I may no longer have my own classroom, but I will always hang out in the sanctuary of whimsy. Hedda Get Bedda, Samson the Strong Man, Freddie the Friar, Wheeler the Dealer, Hilda the Hillbilly, Lena the Cleaner, Annie the Astronaut and I will be cooking up some new whimsical adventure. Join us if you dare.

A cobalt blue glass powder box, a small yellow diamond set in an antique ring, a cookie jar without a lid, a pink Depression glass cake plate, and countless penciled or crayoned notes, folded carefully into small, obtuse shapes, letters, and poems: my keepsakes.

In a small, nondescript dish on a bookcase in my home, there are three buckeyes and one small sea shell. My husband put the buckeyes there sometime last fall, and I added the sea shell later. Gracyn and Griffin, my grandchildren, delight in taking them out and holding them. As if they were treasures of inestimable worth. And when Griffin leaves them on the end table or in the toy box, his sister dutifully rounds them up and returns them to their rightful place. The keepsake place.

Years ago, I was doing a two-day guest stint in an elementary classroom. When the teacher greeted me at the door on the first day with the words, Don’t worry, I won’t leave you alone, I admit that I entered with trepidation. I always over-plan, bringing enough writing activities to more than fill an hour session. That day, however, I ran through every activity I had as well as those I attempted to create on the fly. At home, that evening, I braced myself for my final session. I would have an arsenal of activities, engaging enough for even those with 10-second attention spans. Armed with this arsenal, I made my way to the classroom.

A five-minute warm-up spinning from Eloise Greenfield’s poem, “Keepsake,” and then I would launch into my battery of writing activities.

Keepsake                                                                                                     Eloise Greenfield

Before Ms. Williams died                                                                                   She told Mr. Williams                                                                                       When he gets home                                                                                            To get a nickel out of her                                                                                Navy blue pocket book                                                                                     And give it to her                                                                                         Sweet little gingerbread girl                                                                         That’s me

I ain’t never going to spend it.

After reading the poem, I asked the students if they had keepsakes they would like to share with the class. Patiently, one by one, each student offered up keepsakes that they hoped to pass on to their children and grandchildren: his grandfather’s pocket watch that his grandmother was keeping until he became “more responsible”; a magic fountain pen given as a gift by a friend; a frog dagger (I’m not making this up! And from a cute blonde girl with Shirley Temple curls to boot!); a Nolan Ryan autographed baseball presented to him by his mother just weeks before she died from cancer.

As each child spoke, a ceremonial hush came over the room, as if in merely speaking these keepsakes, we could all share in their great worth. What was intended as a quick warm-up ended as an entire lesson in which students wrote their keepsakes into consecrated poetry.

In the sanctuary of keepsakes, everything matters. A buckeye, a fountain pen, a childhood note, an autographed baseball. A keepsake is less an object and more a sacred reminder of what has been and what will be valued. It carries with it the essence of those who have given it. And it is this essence that moves assuredly through generations, endowing new members with the best of those who lived and loved before them.

As for me and my keepsakes, I ain’t never going to spend them, trade them, lose them, or box them up. In the sanctuary of keepsakes, you treasure them until–when the time is just right–you pass them on. With love.

I was sitting in the back of the Calvin T. Ryan Library on the University of Nebraska Kearney campus one October evening. My biology book, a behemoth olive green text, was fronting for the clandestine work of the night. Tucked inside this book was a paper back copy of Erica’s Jong’s Fear of Flying. A first person, feminist narrative, this was undoubtedly the most scandalous book I had ever read. And the fact that I was going to use it in an academic paper? Doubly scandalous–or incredibly sophomoric and stupid. Because the paper was not due for two weeks, the jury was still out.

You see, I had an idea, a burr-on-the bottom-of-your-pant-leg idea, the kind you cannot shake off no matter how hard you try. While reading the literature of plains’ women, I began to see how their struggles were not altogether unlike those of contemporary women. Would Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather hang out with the likes of Erica Jong? Would their characters eagerly confide in each other? Yes, I thought, yes.

In the end, my professor did not exactly share my passion and conviction for the idea that had ultimately spun itself into a literary comparison of Jong’s protagonist and Beret Hansa, the protagonist in Ole Rolvaag’s pioneer classic, Giants in the Earth. Although I was momentarily disappointed in the grade I received, I continued to be buoyed by the idea that had sustained me for weeks. It was, undeniably, an idea of worth. That I had yet to write it into the worth it deserved was regrettable but heroic nonetheless.

The best ideas require heroism. They demand intellectual risks that scare the bejesus out of us. They blow out the cobwebs and exhilarate us. In the end, stripped of pretense, they bring us face-to-face with what we thought we knew and what we have discovered. In the sanctuary of an idea, we can wander the earth in a moment, travel through time, live through other lives, and dream.

American novelist John Steinbeck wrote, Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. I like that. Get a few, learn how to work and live with them, and watch them multiply. As far as I’m concerned, you just cannot have enough rabbit hutches in the sanctuary of ideas. If you build a dozen, you will need a dozen more.

Years ago, I held a creative writing workshop for children. In a writing warm-up exercise, I asked a group of fifth graders to quickly fill in the blank: too many ___ are dancing on the _____. In true standardized test fashion, they responded: too many dancers are dancing on the stage–right? I mourned the fact that these kids had vacated the sanctuary of ideas, settling, instead, into the safety of right answers. Until I met with the first graders. I posed the same question and held my breath as they responded: too many moons are dancing on the water. Hallelujah! We were going to need more rabbit hutches.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart understood what it was like to be in the sanctuary of ideas:

When I am.  .  . completely myself, entirely alone.  .  .  or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them. 

Who can measure the worth of ideas that flowed from the man into the world’s most sublime music? And does it matter how and from where these ideas came? In the sanctuary of ideas, it matters only that they came–and came abundantly.

Tonight, as I rue the fact that sleep will come too slowly, that I will be unable to keep one idea from impregnating another and yet another, I will take solace in the sanctuary of ideas where I can commune with other late-night thinkers.

For my dad’s Barista friends

Even as a kid, I understood that coffee was cool. Over steaming mugs of Folgers, my parents and grandparents, our neighbors and friends, talked and laughed. This coffee cult was exclusive: no kids allowed. And that alone made it mysterious and cool.

It will grow hair on your chest, my granddad used to tell me when I asked if I could partake. You can have children’s coffee, a milky consolation with lots of sugar, offered up–on special occasions–by my dad.

For years, I stood outside the coffee circle, envious of its sense of community. There were faculty wives’ coffees, neighborhood coffees, PTA coffees, Christmas and church coffees. At the center of these gatherings? Coffee. Pots and carafes of glorious coffee: Arabica, Columbian, French Roast, Italian Roast, Espresso, breakfast and desert coffee. And unfolding from this coffee center were spreads of cinnamon rolls, sweet breads, cookies–some straight out of the oven–and, of course, coffee cake in all its magnificent varieties.

The sanctuary of coffee is an inclusive one. All are welcome: mug or styrofoam-cup-drinkers; storebrand or coffee-shop-drinkers; hot and black, lukewarm, or day-old drinkers; fancy-real-creamers or generic-powdered- creamer-drinkers; one-cuppers or lost-count-cuppers. The coffee covenant is just this: you can drink before you work, before you talk, before you even begin to be.

At Baristas, a local coffee shop in my hometown, my dad and his philosophy friends have been gathering in the sanctuary of coffee for years. Grab your latte, espresso, capuccino, and take a seat. Open yourselves to the talk of the day. Stay as little or as long as you wish. And leave, knowing that the coffee is always on, and the table is always open.

This is the way of coffee. It brings us together in familiar and unfamiliar ways. It gives us a reason to gather and to stay. And, above all, it speaks a universal language.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld said, You don’t really need a place. But you feel like you’re doing something. That is what coffee is. 

Exactly. You feel like you’re doing something when you’re in the sanctuary of coffee. And what could be better than that?

For John O.

There is a pregnant pause, an unintended pause, an awkward pause, a futile pause. But the most sublime pause is the pure pause of one who consciously and fully gives into someone, something, some place, or some act.

The pure pause is meditation on steroids. When thinking slows and then stops, when breathing finds its rhythms in the air, when being weaves filaments of sound and sight and smell around you, this is the pure pause.

Those who know the pure pause know porch swings and tree stands. You might find them at the end of a dock, legs crossed, at sunrise or dusk. Or sitting at a desk, pen in hand, in the presence of time’s most glorious ideas. Those who know the pure pause know the signs of its impending arrival and, when it washes over them, they momentarily melt.

In a nature column, British poet Alice Oswald writes:

If you bend a branch until it’s horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or a colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot.

This is the pure and perfect pause. Comma or colon, it stops us, bursts into bloom, and then unfolds itself in spirals. When we grow weary of doing, when we find it impossible to keep to our lines, we pivot in pure pause.

In the middle of a moonlit night, a just-fed baby in my arms, I have rocked myself into such commas. And my cats have occasionally purred me into such colons. Still, I struggle to punctuate my life and crave the commas and colons that appear to come so easily to others.

For I know that God waits for us inside the pure pause, His still small voice no longer still nor small here. In this pause is the center of wisdom and the eye of eternity.

And in this pure pause, one may find a house of prayer.

These I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.                                                                   Isaiah 56:7    

“Smells, I think, may be the last thing on earth to die.” ― Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past

My grandson, Griffin, has what our family calls a great sniffer. This is a boy who not only stops to smell the roses but the clover, the rocks, the very dirt under his feet. We have found small scented votive candles and his sister’s chapsticks in his pockets, a secret stash ready and available whenever he needs a hit of sandalwood or pink bubblegum.

He is a boy after my own heart (in so many ways!) Sitting in the row nearest the bank of windows at Park School Elementary, I waited–with sensory anticipation–for Mrs. Beebee (real name–I am not making this up) to pass out the newly processed worksheets. Hot off the mimeograph press, they were passed back, student to student. And oh, the smell! We pressed our fifth-grade noses into olfactory heaven: a mix of gasoline, Windex, and turpentine that wafted off the damp pages. Before huffing was ever a thing, we huffed and whispered to our friends across the aisle, “They’re really fresh today!” Even today, the smell of gas, Windex, or turpentine will take me back to fifth grade, Park School, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Beebee.

Scent’s sister is memory. When we smell, and smell deeply, we often close our eyes and let scent transport us. Sometimes to better times and places, and sometimes to darker times and places we would rather forget. Bleach may take us to summer clotheslines with white percale sheets or to hospital bedsides; smoke may take us to campfires with s’mores or to burnt shells of what were once family homes.

In Isak Dinesen’s Winter’s Tales, she writes:

The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night. 

Today, sweet clover sends an airy message as I walk, an aromatic echo of a younger woman’s dreams. I will breathe deeply and let my nose take me where it will.