Happy Monday. I hope all your Mondays will be as happy as your weekends. 
On Sunday, my wife and I went to church in the afternoon. Our church walls were trees. Our arched ceiling was formed by clouds moving with the wind.
We sat on a bench overlooking the Japanese Garden at our favorite Nashville spot, Cheekwood Gardens. From another pew we watched dragonflies dance above a pond, some of them mating in the middle of their zig zagging flight. As one four-winged dragonfly landed on a stone before us, the sun jeweled her wings.
Away from sermons and far from the world tragedies of Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia and Darfur, we breathed air freed from the high humidity that characterizes most summer days in the south.
We didn’t talk about friends or family or illnesses. We didn’t discuss the suffering in the inner city or the pain in rural areas where medical care remains inadequate.
Instead, we talked about the service underway before us: the choir
of birds singing their afternoon hymns, the liturgy of shadows shifting beneath evergreens, the ritual of bamboo trees
tapping each other on the shoulder.
Our benediction arrived when, walking out, we happened upon a fanciful gift created by the imaginative staff of Cheekwood. A team of inspired staff members had created an Arthurian castle nearby the pond…
As we approached the scaled down fortress, we found a recreation of the
great Excalibur, a sword embedded in a sculpted stone, a plaque
nearby describing the legend that he who could withdraw the sword would
become king.
King and Queen for a moment, we entered the castle, traveled its
maze, and eased out into the sunlight of our afternoon church. For me, it was the best religious service my wife and I have attended since we were married in a little chapel close by Lake Michigan forty-two years ago. I felt relaxed, at peace, in love and awed by the way dragonflies and sunlight can awaken God in us. And I felt grateful for the way religion comes true when kissed by spirituality.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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