Dedication

We are gathered to dedicate this meditation garden. That description does not exhaust what people will do when they come here. 

Some will just sit. Others will meditate or pray, rejoice or grieve. Those who contemplate the stone in front of them may see different things represented: the abstract religious symbol of Christianity, the pair of timbers Roman occupiers of Judea used to execute a specific enemy of the state, the meaning of his death for the lives of those who hear his good news, and the hopes his life, words, and death inspired. 

I made it to represent something else: a congregation of individuals who gather to form a simple whole. What others will see as a cross is composed of 21 individual blocks of labradorite, the magic feldspar that glows iridescently from within. I invite you to see these stone blocks as persons because, like human beings, the character of each derives both from its elemental constituents and from the history of its development. 

Labradorite, like other stone, is self-organized elemental soup — it begins as a molten sea of mostly oxygen, silicon, aluminum, and calcium atoms. While the silicon, oxygen, and aluminum in this sea arrange themselves into three-dimensional frameworks of interlocking tetrahedra, the calcium atoms independently form sheets separated by less  than the wavelength of ultraviolet light. These thin films catch and play with photons in the same way that oil slicks and soap bubbles do except that instead of happening on the surface, the light shimmers in golden planes and blue starbursts deep within the stone.  

We have all met persons like this who, by virtue of their temperament and life experience, have grown to glow from within, to shine in the dark — lamps lit with the God spark. I dedicate this cross to the memory of someone whose luminescence has given me what I value most in life.

Ruth Eades McLaren Dayton was a long-time member of this church, a transplanted Canadian Scot, daughter of a somewhat heretical minister of the Church of England. And it was another Anglican minister who introduced her to her future husband, William Berrian Dayton. Together they became the parents of my wife-to-be, Cornelia Hughes Dayton. And Ruth, from the beginning of my courtship of her daughter, was my fierce friend and ally. So I owe my wife and my life here in Maine to her. 

I invite you to recognize in this stone the people in your life who also glow from within. They are not hard to find; they are all around you, imperfect mortals each glistening with the divine. I encourage you to also see that this array of stone blocks illustrates how a gathering of diverse individuals can complete each other to form a simple whole. This same idea is also expressed by the design on the far side where thirteen stone blocks, each distinct in form and substance, are assembled into a perfect square. 

I look forward to learning what these stones tell you.