Journal of Sacred Work

   On Sunday, I was fortunate to be on the receiving end of a rainbow. Nothing in my previous experience prepared me for the transcendent feeling of the event.

  
  After graduating from Vanderbilt Divinity School in 2002, a long period of reflection, and a year of guided discernment with a church committee, I was ordained a minister. 

   What does that really mean. Everyone who believes in Love can be her minister. Ordination is only a formalization, a specific charge to carry God's light in a conscious way. Yet, something else happened for me on that Sunday morning. 

   As I shared with one friend, the total experience was transcendent in a way that seemed beautifully independent of me and, instead, shared by all. There was a strange confluence of light in the room. For a period of over an hour, every single person in the congregation seemed happy, hopeful, and full of Love for themselves and each other. It seemed coincidental that I happened to be a recipient of a random cascade of light.  

   In my church, the ordination practice of the laying on of hands is done differently than some other Christian churches. Every person in the place, whether a member or not, adult, teenager, or child, is invited, one at a time, to touch the ordinand and speak something personal to him. 

   I've been through an awful lot of ceremonies in my life. Yet, I was overwhelmed by this one as person after person (including many I didn't know) filed by me to share some of their most personal and loving hopes. Somehow, I became, for a moment, everyone's brother, father, son, uncle, friend and trusted pastor. For me, it went even further as I felt Love moving through the room in a way that reminded me of the first time that, as a child, I saw the sun shine through a huge, stained glass window. 

   On Sunday, instead of ministering, I was ministered to.

   All of this may sound melodramatic and exaggerated. Yet, those in the congregation affirmed the experience with wondrous comments afterwards, "I've been a member of this church for forty years and I've never saw anything like it," one woman said to me. "Something happened in there," another friend told me with tears in her eyes. Two Catholic women, a friend from South Carolina, and a Jewish woman made separate comments about the magical nature of the service. None of them were talking about me. Instead, some part of their heart recognized that mystery had visited a place designated to be holy. 

   But, there's no adequate way to describe such experiences, is there? Every so often, we enter a strange and beautiful place where Love unexpectedly and suddenly breathes meaning into our world. This can be in a forest, at the kitchen table with family, in the bedroom with someone you love, or walking alone along a city street. 

   I wish that everyone could be the recipient of the Love I received this past Sunday. I wish there was a life ceremony in our society in which each of us, apart from any ministerial ordination, could kneel before a hundred others and have each of those hundred tell us that we are loved. 

   I wish that each of us, especially caregivers who toil to meet titanic needs each day, could feel the ordination of God's Love each morning and across the days.

-Erie Chapman