Venite

Psalm 95:1-7

Come, let us sing to the Lord;

let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.

Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving

and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.

For the Lord is a great God,

and a great King above all gods.

In his hand are the caverns of the earth,

and the heights of the hills are his also.

The sea is his, for he made it,

and his hands have molded the dry land.

Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee,

and kneel before the Lord our Maker.

For he is our God,

and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.

Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!

oh come let us sing unto the Lord

God was showing off this morning in a richly expansive, post-meteor shower arising... early morning in middle Missouri, my first on the land and not merely amidst the hotel bustle of one night in St. Louis. Raucous pinks, swooning yellows and spitfire reds grew brighter and then faded. We met for Morning Prayer in the Rivendell Community House Chapel at 7:15 am. Last night we tucked away the evening with Compline at 9 pm. I am grateful to spend several days with these kind people who welcome visitors as one would welcome Christ.

Venite means come. God beckons. Sometimes God struts, like the falcon we saw at the St. David's Women's Retreat in Sewanee, Tennessee, full-breasted and proud. Now in rural Missouri, I can feel God's presence here in the earth, knowing that generations of Amish prayers infuse the land with their rich devotion. I felt its holiness beneath my feet as I walked off the 5-hour drive here from St. Louis. This is not concrete and car horns, city bustle wrangling my fritter mind and making confetti of it. The wifi connection is slow. I am slow. I let the slowness have a right to be.

The photograph is from the entryway at Bethany Spring, where I spent a blessed several days in its own quiet holiness. Its "abbess" Tracy greeted and held us, fed us, laughed with us. It was a home into which I was truly welcomed. I didn't tiptoe, not even in the Abbey worshipping and chanting amongst the Gethsemani monks. I sank into bolts of recovery, eating heartily of Tracy's delicious evening meals, pulling two 10-hour nights of soul exhausted collapse. Twice I jogged through rural landscape, past unremarkable expanse and rusty water towers.

I was welcomed and loved. I left blessing those new beloveds.

I pause between missing, being and anticipating. They coalesce when I breathe. Fritter brain notices another present moment.

The intermittent wind is bold and unapologetic.