Maybe you can go home again...

if you don't expect everything there to make sense.

Maybe it's my age.

The experience of church isn't the same as it once was for me.

Years ago it was the mystery that kept my interest.

Mystery has mostly been replaced by logic...

which can be useful

if you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your car 

but doesn't satisfy

the way the symbol of the stained glass lamb does.

  

Satisfaction is important.

This morning the gray-haired fellow who sat in a pew in front of me

got up to read, and the voice had a familiar, satisfying ring to it.

"THE WORD that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Come, go down to the potter's house,

and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was

working at his wheel.  The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand,

and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

The reader was once a student of mine.

He was once young Vincent Hamilton.

He's a surgeon now in the town where he was a boy.

I remember his mother and his father... good people.

The morning in church had something to do with the way I watched

in the afternoon a bumble bee working a hedge of blue flowers.

I wondered how something with small wings and a big body could fly.

It's a mystery.

Brunch with family and friends was satisfying, too,

not because the food was good, and it was... very good...

but because of the mystery that binds us together.