Sacred Bookends

I am coming to you from the haunting beauty of coastal South Carolina, a much needed vacation.  Last night, I slept out on the screened balcony among the rustling branches of 30-foot magnolia trees and palmettos.  As I stretched awake this morning, the birds and cicadas forming a symphonic 6:00 AM alarm clock, the sun insistent against one side of my face, I felt what can only be called adoration.

It reminded me of something I heard about a few years ago: sacred bookends.  When the pandemic started, a close friend shared that every identical quarantine day was book-ended by coffee in the morning and wine in the evening.  As delightful as that sounds, that's not what I'm talking about.  I mean sacred bookends: a ritual in the morning and a ritual at night that touches a deeper part of you and acknowledges the miracle of our living selves.  A whispered prayer, a short reading, a mindful stretch, a song, observing the very breath that keeps us alive.  And it doesn't have to be involved or lengthy.  During a fairly rough season in my life, I forced myself to say thank you every morning when my feet swung out of bed and touched the floor.  Uttering those two words every day had the effect of refining how I navigated that season, and I now find myself saying thank you again for that very fact.

I believe it is impossible to live well in a holistic way without first accessing that Something that lifts you out of ordinary life.  For some, that is God, for others it may be earth, the universe or Source, or simply nature or love or the very existence of life.  Perhaps it is a longing for something that can't be named.  (If you want to read an interesting commentary on longing, see the quote I share below.)

I encourage you to identify some sacred bookends and give them a trial run.  Tweak them if you need to.  Or let them evolve on their own.  My bookends of today are certainly different from my bookends of only a few years ago.  And sometimes I fail to do them, because I'm too tired, or I'm dragged into something more urgent first thing in the morning.  Accept the inevitable imperfection of the practice, so that you can take pleasure in your sacred bookends and give them a chance to become as important to you as food, air and water.  

Now, here's that quote I promised you:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you ~ the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”  ~ C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 1941