the roofless church, new harmony

Upon checking out of our hotel in Evansville, we began our trip west in earnest.  I had not planned on stopping again until we needed food or gas, but my navigation app directed us to within a couple of miles of New Harmony, Indiana, the first place where Dave and I did summer theatre together and began dating.  Over the years we have returned for work and pleasure.  On this Wednesday morning, we detoured into town and walked around. 

A centerpiece of the town is the Roofless Church, a walled park with a domed and shingled structure protecting the Jacques Lipschitz statue The Descent of the Holy Spirit.  Lipschitz was a Lithuanian Jew who moved to Paris in the early twentieth century to become a part of the Montmartre and Montparnasse communities of artists that included Picasso and Modigliani.  During Hitler’s occupation of France, Lipschitz was one of the few and fortunate Jews who was able to evade the Nazi regime and relocate to the US.  To my knowledge a version of this statue exists in three places in the world:  New Harmony, the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles, and St. Columba’s Abbey on the Scottish island of Iona.  And I have seen each one. 

I’ve been wrestling lately with how to read the psalms, particularly the ones where David is claiming that his own righteousness should protect him.  I know so well his failings, as I do my own.  So, how do I read such psalms without the tinge of self-righteousness? It has occurred to me that I can read them as they apply to Jesus, the perfect man.  Jesus surely knew the Psalms, and he surely prayed them.  Here’s how I pray a portion of Psalm 17 with Jesus in mind: 

       Father God, You probed the heart of Jesus and examined him at night.
            (Is that what all those night prayers in lonely places were all about?)
       Though You tested Jesus, You found nothing,
             for he resolved that his mouth wouldn’t sin.
            (Oh!  That I could make that same resolution, and keep it!)
       Jesus kept himself from the ways of the violent. 
            His steps held to Your path; his feet never slipped. 
            He called on You, God, and knew that You would answer him—
            You heard his prayer.  
           (And You hear mine, because Jesus continues to intercede on my behalf!)

Eight days before taking Peter, James and John up on a mountain to pray with him, Jesus said, “Some of you who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.”  On the mountain he was transfigured before them, changed to a bright and flashing being in the presence of Moses and Elijah.  Peter wanted to pitch his tent in this kingdom, right then and there.  Then wonder of wonders, God spoke!  “Listen to this man.  He is my Son.”  Well, yeah!  They saw the kingdom just as Jesus had predicted. It wasn’t time to stay there yet, but what a memory to return to when confused by the events of the next week and the rest of their lives.  

Frederick Buechner wrote, “Religions start, as Frost says poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with the bush going up in flames…As for the man in the street, any street, wherever his own religion is a matter of more than custom, it is likely to be because, however dimly, a doorway opened in the air once to him too.  A word was spoken and, however shakily, he responded.”

This place in a backwater corner of Indiana has been one of those doorways for me.

Love, Liz

     Lord, Jesus knew that in righteousness he would see Your face. (from Psalm 17:15)
          (And in sacrificing his life for mine, Jesus enabled me to see You too. 
           When I awake from this dream called life,
           I will find satisfaction in seeing You face to face.)