Homemade Shrines

Yes, I have far to go: and also God’s love is my home, right here in the wilderness, too.

Hi friends,

I know I’m supposed to be in “influencer book launch mode” for my real job right now now but whatever, I woke up this morning and just wanted to write a regular old essay for you. (Clearly, I am well cut out for “influencer” life if you happened to catch my attempt at influencing in a Target last weekend, bless my own heart.)

So I thought I’d tell you about something I saw on my walk in California. Every year for more than ten years now, I have spent a few days at the start of the year with five of my very best friends in the world.¹

This year, we landed in Northern California where 9 degrees Celsius felt like a heat wave to me.

You can always spot a Canadian in the wild: we’re the ones in summer blouses while everyone else wears parks and sweaters.

We borrowed a renovated parsonage in Nevada City (which is in California, funnily enough, #TheMoreYouKnow etc.) where we talked for so many hours about so many things, we should have perished from it.

As a memento, Jamie gave us each a velvet pouch containing a beautiful silver ring with the words “BE KIND” engraved on the outside. Lovely, right? But when one of the other girls peered inside the ring at the inscription there, it was engraved “…of a bitch” and we laughed until I had to put my head on the table. That is our Jamie, and I would lie down on a train track for her without even asking why.

There isn’t one part of my life that is unexamined or unloved by these women, and that’s true for each of us. We are so tender with each other’s wounds but unflinchingly in our big sister bossing and relentless in our truth-telling. I confess that I came into this weekend pretty beat up and carrying some very heavy things which have been happening on my side of the computer screen, so this was a restorative sisterhood weekend I desperately needed this year. Sometimes your friends see you more clearly than you see yourself and we require the mirror of their love to find own own sense of clarity.

But on the final afternoon of my time with them, this introvert needed a minute. So I googled myself a nearby walking trail and went out to find a tree. (You know how I am.) On my walk, I saw something interesting as I often do, so here we are and you’ll find that essay below.

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But first, another Preorder Thank You Gift

Before I get into that though, I did promise my publisher to share a couple of the preorder bonuses for my new book - Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith - with you so here are those first.

Thank you to everyone who took advantage of the preorder bonus for a sneak peek at the first three chapters of Field Notes for the Wilderness. And if you have preordered, you can still take advantage of that here so here’s the link to claim that bonus.

And our NEW preorder bonus is a preview of the audiobook, as read by yours truly.

Here’s the link to claim that one. (This was my first time narrating my own audiobook since my accent has always been considered a bit too distracting for most American listeners but this time around, we decided to go for it.)

Again, thank you so much for preordering the book. It means a lot to me and I’m grateful for your support and trust.

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And now, Homemade Shrines

After a bitterly cold spell back home, which relegated me to the dusty treadmill in our basement for my walks, I was pretty excited to be walking outside in California this weekend. The truth is that I regularly need to go for a little walk to feel more like a proper person. So I took my ratty runners and headed out the door. It had been raining most of the week there, so the trails were muddy, the leaves on the forest floor were rotting, and everything smelled of earth: basically, I was thrilled.

A few pictures from my walk

While I wandered, I came across a suspension bridge over a small river or creek bed. At the other end of it was a rock retaining wall, holding up the muddy hillside. And inside that rock wall was a little ledge with carvings of the river. Folks had placed a few little items on the ledge like rocks or sprigs of redwoods or pinecones, almost like offerings at a religious shrine.

The little ledge gave me a pause as I walked past. I had called my husband on the phone and we were already knee-deep in talking through a few things that the girls and I had been exploring together while I walked. (I don’t mean to be vague, but I’m not quite ready to talk about it all yet - or maybe ever. But generally, in the safety of the love of my friends who know me so well, some windows in my soul got thrown open and I’m catching some gulps of fresh air for the first time in a little while.)

And as I kept hiking, I kept thinking of that little stone shrine behind me, surrounded by moss, holding offerings, while I talked it through with Brian. After we hung up the phone, I doubled back. And then I sat there at that damp shrine for a while in silence.

I don’t feel super comfortable or at peace in big ornate cathedrals. I mean, I like them and appreciate them, I even enjoy being there sometimes and feel a bit prayerful in my own way.² But that’s just a place I visit, sometimes like a thief or an interloper, other times as a guest or a visiting cousin, depending on my perspective that day.

My actual soul-home has a brisk cross breeze and a big sky and a bite in the air. When it comes time for God and I to get down to business, it’s almost always near the trees and the dirt, maybe some clear water with a rocky shore. And it’s often these exact sorts of humble places, often overlooked by tourist guides and apps. Hardly anything special to outside eyes. These places are my cathedrals, my own thin places. You have yours, I know.

Over the past few years, one small ritual of grief in which I’ve found some meaning has been the practice of leaving mementos.³ A few of my friends have hiked the Camino de Santiago and they have spoken about the little cairns and shrines along the path where pilgrims leave mementos that are meaningful to them alone. I get that. At a graveside for a friend, I once placed a rock from her home of rolling green hills, just a small pebble to make sure home was nearby for her memory. It was my way of letting her know that I was there and she was there once and I remembered everything.

At the St. Lawrence Gulf on a windy day years ago, I once built a small cairn of red sandstone rocks and stood there until the sun went down behind the dunes, experiencing that Spirit-breathed soul healing that comes only with time, silence, and space. When the darkness was there at last, I left the little pile of stones behind me. I knew it would fall - they always do - but in my memory, they stand like a a homemade shrine to that moment of reorientation.

This little ritual marks the fact that we’re pilgrims on the move, yes, but every once in a while we stop to remember and reflect of how far we’ve come, too. We leave something behind to say, “I was here.” We acknowledge our own journey - even as we leave that place behind. There in the damp redwood forest of northern California there was a little shrine and a humble pile of found objects, all holding meaning I won’t understand, but whose sacramental purpose is beautiful to someone.

There’s an old word in Christianity called “ebenezer.” It’s an old Hebrew word that means, “stone of help.” (Most of us know that word because of the classic hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which includes the line “Here I raise my Ebenezer / Here by Thy great help I've come / And I hope by Thy good pleasure / Safely to arrive at home.”) In the first book of Samuel, there was a battle and, despite their faithlessness and contentiousness, God intervened in their favour so the prophet set up a stone altar called - wait for it - an ebenezer. It was meant to serve as a marker or a reminder of God’s faithfulness at a particular moment in time and to tell the story for future generations. For us church kids, anytime something happened that was momentous in our spiritual lives or journeys, we would sometimes use that same language - raising an ebenezer - as a nod to that story but mainly as a way of spiritualizing a moment in our lives. It was our way of saying, “Something happened here and it’s worth remembering, it’s worth paying attention to this and I hope I don’t forget it.” Sometimes we would create little mementos for those moments but sometimes they simply lived in our memories or stories or relationships as turning points or epochs in our lives. I mean, it could be a bit silly at times but spare me from snottiness about our earnest old selves, you know?

I wondered if this little shrine at the river was an ebenezer for someone. Was this their way of saying that, on the journey home, they left something behind to bless the space that they stood once? even as they kept going?

There is something beautiful about marking how far we’ve come even though we’re still on the move.

When we find ourselves in these wilderness journeys in our soul as part of our evolving faith, when we are wandering and wondering and questioning, unsure even of what home means now, we do stumble across these little shrines and homemade altars. And they are almost always an invitation.

Perhaps we are always being invited to remember how far we have come.

Perhaps we are being asked to pause for a moment and slow down, to pick up something that was meaningful to us and place it on the altars we pass by.

We can raise our own ebenezers to the moments of beauty and struggle, the choices for healing we made and the friends we lost along the way, the places where we encountered God in disguise and the significance of our own lives.

This week was a bit of a turning point for me, in ways I’m not sure I fully understand yet. I’ll just need to live into some of the truth before I really understand it. But as I stood there, I thought of how beautiful it is to acknowledge how far we’ve come.

I wondered about the vast courage it takes to set some things down and just leave them behind.

And I wondered why it takes so long for us to acknowledge our own need for an altar and our need to mark a moment when God was present.

Yes, the woods are all around and the path is muddy and it’s cold outside: and also God is here. Yes, other people might walk right by our shrines without acknowledgement or care or interest: and also God is here.

Yes, I am tired and a bit beat up and questioning: and also God is here.

Yes, I have far to go: and also God’s love is my home right here in the wilderness, too.

Maybe it’s time to build your own homemade shrines to the journey you’ve been on. Gather up the moments and the memories that prove you were here, even as you keep moving. Leave something behind that says, “I remember everything.”

That day, I picked up a small branch from the forest floor and a rock. I placed them on the shrine with all the other pilgrims’ offerings. I stood for a moment and took a few deep breaths.

And then I turned my back on all of it and kept going.

Love S.

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In case you missed these recent Field Notes:

• Finally: Navigating Marriage + An Evolving Faith: Our Story & Our Practices (plus an audio version for paid subscribers)

• Preorder bonus for Field Notes for the Wilderness!: Plus videos! and endorsements! and GIFs make a return to the newsletter! Along with exclamation points apparently! 🫣 (!)

• Perhaps this is one secret of re-enchantment: Or, The Sacramental Masterpiece of Vacuuming

• Looking back at 2023: Field Notes 2023 in review - your favourites and mine

• My Favourite Books of 2023: The faves for fiction and nonfiction books

1. Many of you know and love them or perhaps have followed their good work over the years, I know. Our little crew is myself, Jamie Wright, Sarah Goodfellow, Jen Hatmaker, Tara Livesay, and Kristen Howerton.

2. If you read my one memoir, Miracles and Other Reasonable Things, you probably already know that part of me since we undertook a big trip to Rome in that story and that theme showed up a lot in there.

3. I actually have a whole chapter in the new book about rituals and why embracing both established and homemade rituals has been good for my own evolving faith, in case you’re interested.