chapel on the lake
The chapel on the lake is barely a chapel- tucked into the woods at the edge of the water. Every morning I visit. Sometimes a tight muscled quick stride takes me in and out, sometimes a zigzag path that takes twice as long as it should. Somehow I never run into anyone else there.
On the hill above the chapel, dewy frosted green turns richly saturated under cloven hooves. They know the path I take, and leave it open at the right time. Not changing my pace, I feel the watchful gaze of permissive trust follow me to the edge of the slope. I let myself be pulled down, slowing my fall with heavy steel toe steps. Open space drops in a second as the trees rise out of the hillside to meet me. All at once the wind breaks the birdsong rises the sun clears the northwest ridge. The path is brown and rocky now, steeply descending in the same route that rainfall takes to the lake.
The chapel is shaped like a Roman amphitheater- half a circle of staircase seats all centered on a little wooden cross. It's not a Christian place. Years ago someone brought the stone and laid it out, telling anyone who came by that this was sacred space. All the lakeshore is sacred land, but here is the spot where we acknowledge it. Here is a place to come into yourself and at once to come into the world.
Sitting down in a sun-warmed spot, I begin to pay attention to my thoughts. The lake in front of me shows an almost-perfect recreation of the scene above it. The light wouldn't make an image unless the lake were there to reflect it. My eyes show me an almost-perfect recreation of the scene in front of me. Sun rising over the lake hits the water and bounces back just as bright, vibrant detail distorted by waves. The light wouldn't make a world unless I was there to reflect it.
This morning I wake up earlier than I want to so that I have a few minutes to spend at the chapel. Today will be a long day and I probably won’t see it again until hours after dark. I approach the chapel and slip into thought. There’s something about simplicity here. Religion comes easily. There’s usually so many steps and so many questions and answers, reaching towards fantasy and afters that no one can report back from. Anything to distract from the now, to say that here is not what matters, here is one rest stop on the journey to your higher calling, here is necessary suffering for your god and He will reward you soon. You will live forever on this world that you are not native to once the scum has been wiped off.
Can you have that feeling of religion without the complexity? In some beliefs You are Other, your god is not beholden to the rules of totality and creates You out of the same foreign stuff. Totality is made for you to experience and grow and leave behind. All that is was and ever will be here is a plaything. And in this sandbox the only obligation is to have religion. As long as you have religion and faith and works, you will leave this plane for the next and find eternal bliss.
What about now? What about me, sitting here in the chapel on the lake watching the water? What needs to be done to make here what matters? Religion, as most people do it, is belief and worship in a higher power. But there is no higher power- our totality is infinitely recycled materials. Nothing is ever created or destroyed. So we’re left with belief and worship and no higher power. Religion would be inconsequential without worship. Belief in an empty shell is worth nothing. Worship is essential, but what is worship without belief? Worship without belief is simply ritual. Ceremonial acts, repeated acts, with intention to celebrate and honor. If I live with this intention can all of existence become a ritual in celebration of itself?
I almost spent too much time there this morning. I gather my thoughts and my things and continue on the trail to the dining hall.
I live a ten minute walk from the chapel. Though my cabin is the most remote, the chapel and the space it creates between my living and my working makes the distance worth it. My cabin is a four-bedroom box that houses seven humans and innumerable mice and snakes. We rarely see them, but as all housemates do they leave proof of their presence. The snakes shed their skins in the circuit breaker box.
Living here it’s so difficult to feel things truly and deeply. If I try too hard and want it too much, (my muscles tense breathing sticks a feeling that my eyes will close unless I prop them open) a stone has been placed in my upper abdomen, just below the ribs. This stone is much denser than it should be, so it tugs and sags my insides down. It pulls down at all the attachments and ligaments inside me. It creates a space in my chest where feelings should be felt, and they are on occasion. Usually it’s while I’m at the chapel.
At a certain point knowledge becomes understanding, when you can comprehend what something is to you, and what it is to itself at the same time. When something is understood in its totality it ceases to become reason and word and thought and instead becomes a feeling that rests in that space in my chest. Some things are understood innately and by many- a magnificent sunrise, a new lover, a strange place, a journey without a destination. These things are understood and felt deeply because they don’t need conscious thought to fully know what they are. When something’s thought about and reasoned and logically known, it ceases to be understood. If I want to understand it again, I have to be in a place like the chapel.
About fifty feet down the trail towards the dining hall is where we pulled out the deer. Most animals, once they’re out of danger, will run to water when they’re injured. Maybe they know they’ll need to hydrate so they can heal the wound, maybe they know water means easy food sources. Maybe they know they’re dying and want to go somewhere the others will find them. I don’t know why he came here to die, but by the time we can move him the deer has been floating in the lake for days. He was found on the second day of a new school group’s week-long stay, and since the path to the dining hall is so well-traveled we can’t pull it out without the kids seeing. So he stayed by the chapel.
He found a place to rest in the reeds and brush at the shore, and during this week he is an object of awe for the kids. Lake Ecology class delays by ten minutes because I first have to steer a boat of 20 children close enough so they can all see him. Their curiosity has to be satiated before they can think about anything else. The children love him. It could be called a morbid fascination, but the’re so young that they have never seen real death before. It’s no longer common to see death so fresh and organic. No euthanasia, no formaldehyde, no burial and no cremation. Not long enough to show bone. Just process- a slow return to the dirt.
