sacrament.

Tonight my apartment got sanctified.

I've been reading a book on Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and he talks about how objects and places cannot have spiritual meaning in and of themselves. They acquire meaning by being associated with sacred moments. For a place to be meaningful, there has to be the memory of the Thing that Happened.

And it's not that anything incredibly profound or story-worthy happened. People came. We had butternut squash lasagna and wine and strawberries with ice-cream. We were together. We talked. There were candles burning and lullaby versions of Radiohead playing in the background.

But that's all that needed to happen. A quote I wrote down from Heschel goes, "Sanctify the Sabbath by choice meals, by beautiful garments; delight your soul with pleasure and I will reward you for this very pleasure." The reward I got was the feeling, the assurance, that my apartment is now a place to be, a place where people relax and eat a little and talk a little and rest a little from all the distracting things of life, like work and school. I've realized more than once that this whole thing, of bringing friends together and feeding them, is my version of church now, because I still haven't found a church that feels like church. But this does.