The Sacrament of a Good Question

This morning, I’m sharing words from Farm Church, a congregation in Durham, North Carolina. As they shared this week on Facebook:

When has someone offered a question in conversation that was so lovely, so inviting, and so spacious that it was, to you in that moment, sacramental? Can you remember a time when someone’s curious, non-anxious questioning presence created for you “a glimpse of the almost unbearable preciousness and mystery of life”? (Frederick Buechner’s words to describe the witnessing of sacrament.)

Perhaps some of Mary Oliver’s questions come to you as sacrament, especially that last one…

“The Summer Day”

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean –

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?