Stone Church I venture no more than a low whisper, afraid I’ll startle the people of heaven. - Li Po
The one stark gable form stands reminder a roof once sheltered worship there where, now, sky spills in. Weed, tough slender stalks of it, and other softer, finer wild grasses grow either side of a worn threshold. Stone masons, so long ago, carved fluted casing into the dark wall, this coarse granite smoothed at the small entrance off to one side of what had been the altar. My father came forty years ago driven to the site on his own. Standing at the doorway, looking in at what was no longer there, he’d realized this strange sense of scale, the stature of men a thousand years — five hundred generations — back. I think he said it was raining, cold, the wind was up. Telling me, he always tried to capture the mix of comedy and awe. History. Absent tracing the doorframe his hand had found one place smoother — more polished than the rest — where so many had touched the stone that same place as softly, just as elsewhere-minded as he was, fixed or trying to fix on prayer in whatever language, the blessings of different years, saint names, grief and its rote consolations — or only steadying themselves as they stepped across a width of stone the color of pale flesh, wet with rain. Tom Driscoll
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