The essence of love is giving without thought of remuneration, of listening without regard to what we get out of the conversation. If we can give nothing else to another person, we can give them our attention. We can turn off our cell phones and computers and televisions and just sit a foot apart, look into each other’s eyes and listen to one another.
Finding solitude in the midst of our busy lives is, first and foremost, always an intentional activity. We must choose to go away to a place in the country, to a retreat house, to a to a chapel, to a walking trail. Or we must choose to create a space of sacred solitude within our everyday lives, which is where we find ourselves most of the time.
We all need times of solitude in our lives for three interconnected reasons: We need to quiet the world. We need to quiet ourselves. And we need to do both of those things so we can better listen for God as he whispers our names and quietly lets us know just what it is we’re supposed to be doing with our lives.
Like Jesus, we need to have our “lonely place,” that quiet sacred space we can go, not just to get away from the world and its busy-ness, but to prepare ourselves more fully for our engagement in the world.
Our ability to be both truly present to one another and aware of God’s presence in our lives is a gift unto itself. It is our calling. There’s nothing more important we can do today.
Walking through cemeteries, I have learned over the years, is a lesson in awareness. We are reminded, of course, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But we also learn the power of quiet, of stillness, of non-busyness. It’s hard to hurry through a graveyard, and why would we want to?
Cross-stitched we are, indeed. We are sewn and bound together in faith by these two images, one of the Baby Jesus lying in the manger and the other of a full-grown 30-something man hanging on a cross. In both he is held by the things of earth, by the texture and smell of wood and soil and iron.
They are the faces in the crowd, some standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of this condemned prophet or rabble-rouser, take your pick, as he stands mute before the authorities, as he flinches but never complains against the searing heat of the lashes, as he bears the weight of the beam across his shoulder blades and feels the bite of the sheer mass and the splintered wood.
We all need a place to pray with others who share our faith or just to be alone with our thoughts and our God. Washington, D.C. has many such places for believers of every kind. And with the weight of the nation and the world on the shoulders of so many of these men and women, it’s a good thing.
Located between Sedona and the Village of Oak Creek is one of the region’s manmade (and woman-designed!) wonders: The Chapel of the Holy Cross.