Not all worship happens inside church buildings on Sunday mornings. Worship can mean a religious ceremony or service. Worship can also mean, simply, a feeling of reverence. Worship, in its best sense, is communion with the Holy Spirit, feeling connected to God.
On a bright spring morning, it’s hard to feel that kind of connectedness inside a stuffy church building, sitting on a hard pew, surrounded by other people. On a bright spring morning, worship might more authentically happen amongst a field of buttercups, towering sycamore trees, or alongside a trickling mountain stream.
My Sunday mornings are usually spent on my farm. The mountain ridge facing my house is my cathedral. The trees towering over me diminish any troubles or dilemmas I think might overwhelm me. The breeze softly and almost silently blowing through the meadow between my home and the ridge refreshes my body and soul.
I can have quiet here. I can have peace here. I can let go of all troubles and dilemmas and simply be. I can wander through the forest or the meadow and feel part of all of nature, no more significant or insignificant as any other part of nature. I can get in touch with who I am, stripped of all artifice.
Wisdom surrounds me. I have only to look around me for lessons that speak to me in messages both personal and universal. On a spring day, new life springs up from a ground thought cold and dead only a few days previous. Daffodils and tulips appear in unexpected places, as surprises from the divine. Dogwood trees produce blossoms from branches remembered from seasons past but forgotten in their off-season commonplace familiarity.
Essential worship takes place when we are fully ourselves and fully in tune with the world around us. And in my cathedral of sycamore trees soaring over a grassy meadow, I am more truly worshipful than in any other place on earth.
Cynthia Coe is the author of Considering Birds & Lilies: Finding Peace & Harmony with the Everyday World Around Us. For news of upcoming publications and for blog posts, please follow this blog or her author page on Amazon.
Sycamore Cove 