Behold, behold...

I walked around campus last night after the storm, looking at all the splintered trees and the empty concrete perch where the fourth of four Basilica spires used to stand, ducking under caution tape, my sloshy steps marked by an ever-increasing combination of fascination, curiosity and profound sadness. The sadness surprised me - not that I expected to be happy at the sight of destruction or anything. But I guess I never realized how much I felt that this place, and especially the Basilica and the trees (...damn hippie), somehow belonged to me. And not actually to me. To us, you know. To everybody. I can never not smile at that beautiful, almost giddy feeling of being a part of everybody in the way we're meant to be, in that Body-Of-Christ, that-all-may-be-one sort of way. A tiny piece of a beautiful whole, a piece so small that it's impossible to conceive that the whole would be any different if you weren't there, but still believing that somehow it would, and knowing that you would be different and maybe nothing if not for it. And realizing that life loses its purpose when lived solitarily, it hits you in the strangest moment, after a maybe-tornado perhaps, that we're all meant to be a part of something larger than ourselves, and that, truly, this is the thing you're meant to be a part of. The moments I've shared in that choir loft have come to define not only my college experience but my life. And even those moments belong to everyone, folk choir and congregation and university and anyone else who comes to be annointed with a song of the Lord. I wince as I gaze up at the shrouded damage to the Basilica, a quick shot of pain running through my heart like a shiver, even though it's relatively minimal and probably less than it could have been, and even though it will probably be repaired in a matter of weeks. And then it hits me, as I walk and stare, that this is the sort of thing Christ meant when he talked about destroying the temple and rebuilding it in three days. No damage can be done to a Church who celebrates every day as Resurrection Day, who builds its life in God who makes all things new and all things one. Resurrection. Oh man.

So anyway I'm walking around again tonight and it occurs to me how amazing it is that this great and mighty wind, which in its swirling fury downed power lines and cracked the trunks of gigantic, hundred-year-old trees right in half and sent a piece of the Basilica crashing to the sidewalk below, also left most of the millions of leaves, hardly connected to anything at all to begin with, perfectly unharmed on their branches. Maybe it's science or something, the pole-pavement/trunk-soil/concrete-brick bonds and the twig-leaf bonds, and the wind currents, maybe some tectonic plate movements, and things of that nature. Probably. But in an everybody-now, Body-Of-Christ, all-may-be-one little way, it makes me smile a little bit that the leaves hang on to the branches even after the entire tree has blown to the ground.

Or maybe I've just been watched a little too much "High School Musical."

Nah.