Home Safely

After spending most of the day Friday traveling, we arrived safely home late in the evening. It will take a few days to get caught up with the time. I slept about five hours, dreaming mostly of Rome. I was looking for a place amid ruined arches. Maybe the dream depicts the job before me of making sense of the experiences I've had while traveling and reading. Right now it seems like a really big job. But I hope over the next few weeks, before I resume my ministry at the church, that I'll be able to organize things in a way that will help others taste a little of this banquet I've feasted on this summer.
One of the things that fascinated me on this trip were doorways. Maybe I was thinking about the Celtic understanding that a doorway is a "thin air" place, a place where God is especially real and present. Doorways mark the boundaries between where we've been and where we are going. God meets us in those places of change, inviting us into new ways of seeing and being. I feel my experiences this summer are bringing me through a new doorway.
On Thursday I went beneath St Cecilia's Church in Rome. There were a number of rooms beneath the ancient church that were a part of a large home that once stood on the sight. The home dated to the first or second century. It was the home of a wealthy family, a senatorial family. Cecilia lived in this home sometime around the end of the 2nd century. She was a Christian and she open this beautiful home up to other Christians in that Roman Community for worship. It was a house church. Cecilia was eventually charged with working against Rome, a charge leveled at Christians during the first three centuries in Rome. She was beheaded near the baths in her home. After Christianity became legal in Rome a large church was built on this site honoring the hospitality of Cecilia.
As I walked through the large rooms and stepped on some of the original tile that had covered the floor, I thought of the great community of faith that met there over 1800 years ago. I thought of the faith and generosity of Cecilia that enabled her to share the things that came to her by way of her status in life with Christians who were slaves and laborers in Rome. The church that is built over the house is very elaborately decorated. It is a place of beauty. But for me the presence of God was there in the ruins of that home, there in the place where Christians walked through doorways as equals to give thanks to God for the life that they shared and for the hope they had in the resurrected Christ.
One of the symbols carved on a gravestone from that period in Rome, now embedded in the porch of St Cecilia church, was that of a ship. It was a symbol of the church. Maybe it referred back to the story of the disciples in a ship with Jesus on a stormy night. They were frightened, but Jesus was there and they were not harmed.
The early house church where people came together to break bread, to read the old stories and to pray reminds us of the profound simplicity of our life together as a church. The church was and remains about the people who gather to love one another and to try and love others in meaningful ways.