WORSHIP

The Rev Roddy Hamilton reflects on outdoor worship and sacred spaces.

WE spend a lot of imagination creating sacred space, and rightly so. We offer such space to enable an encounter with God, a unique space because of history, story, design and each uniquely moves us beyond the everyday. 

Such sacred spaces that are our churches have a pattern of beauty that inspires an invitation with the holy. Such imagination to create such space is extraordinary.

God’s original cathedral needs less fabric funding and everyday maintenance, for it is found in the outdoors. The sacred space around and about us in gardens, parks, hillsides, even graveyards, can be even more extraordinary, and, living into this new season of spring, maybe we have time to explore worship in the wild.

Outdoor worship invites a whole range of new experiences in our encounter with God. Colour, sound, light are all immediately different and shapes a tactile setting where all our senses come into play.

Imagine the scene: the old Glasgow tradition of bringing a chair from your house into the garden. A circle grows and the chat becomes a retelling of a story of Jesus. Most of Jesus’ teaching and story-telling was in the wild, so hearing and seeing these stories in that setting can invite an authentic re-hearing: the parable of the sower retold between path, lawn, and soil; the feeding of the 5000 seated on the plane each with a basket; everyone gathered round a fire cooking fish experiencing the story of the disciples on the beach; a dialogue between Mary and Jesus that first Easter morning where both the saviour and the promise was unrecognised.

Imagine Zacchaeus actually in the tree retelling his story; Peter actually by a fire verbalising his internal conflict between denying and affirming his relationship with Jesus; the disciples on Easter morning actually in a graveyard wondering what on earth this all means. You can see the attraction of storytellers being able to use space visually that might raise new questions and experiences in the midst of the story.

The informality of outdoor worship also might level us where we are all sharing a new experience together, with children and adults. Even offering the same liturgy used inside a building in a garden, feels new.

Of course, the days of ‘summer mission’ did this daily throughout the summer across Scotland. I remember it well myself. But we often simply took what we did inside, outside. Being outside allows us to do things we can’t do inside: encountering the spiritual with a little more imagination, using the tactile gifts of creation to shape prayer, using twigs, leaves, flowers, silences, smells to focus our prayers, breathing a different air, listening in a way we can’t inside, finding things and touching things that speak into us without a sermon being necessary, doing things such as bark rubbing that speaks of intricacy, beauty, imagination, all without the need for words.

“ Such sacred spaces that are our churches have a pattern of beauty that inspires an invitation with the holy.

And in the end, leaving nothing behind, no footprint is left. The sacred beauty of such a moment provokes an awareness of the cathedral God provides for us fresh every morning.

Of that maintenance mentioned at the beginning – maybe in outdoor worship we grow a deeper appreciation for loving our planet and investing a greater worth in its stewardship for every place is a cathedral designed by the extraordinary imagination of God.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.