i am not a religious person.  let's start there.

but i worked for six years at an episcopal school, and it was really a very important experience for me.  there were things i was quite skeptical of (the virgin birth) and things i questioned (raising millions for a new church when that money could be put towards easing suffering).  but i saw religion used for so much good - to build schools in haiti both before and after the earthquake, the fundraise to pay for tuition for haitian kids, to teach kindness and love to those around us.  the episcopalians are incredibly welcoming, and that school welcomed me in so many ways, not just during those weekly chapel services.

if you take the god out of it, all of the lessons of jesus are ones we can follow and should follow and are hard to follow but are ideals we should aspire to.

i learned some songs in those weekly chapel services that have become very special to me: god of our fathers, seek ye first, and this one, which we sang frequently during my last year at the school:


since hearing about the shooting in the charleston church i have been thinking of this word and this song frequently: sanctuary.  this morning, after NPR reported on the first services back in that church since the shooting, i played this song off of youtube on my drive to work and cried and then played it a second time.

sanctuary:
1. how horrific that a church - a sanctuary - could be breeched in this way.  though a church is not my sanctuary, we cannot deny that for many it is quite an important one.
2. my job as a teacher and our job as a school is to be a safe space, an ear to listen, to take students as they come.  i don't think i had put it in those words before this morning.  i have been repeating that phrase: i'll be a living sanctuary.