Walking With My Brother

I was filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude yesterday, as I first knelt at church in preparation for our weekly Mass — that place our Lord has made for us to gather together to worship Him.

Our church is a magnificent structure; the oldest in our town. You can almost feel the history of love and reverence that has blessed the place.

My gratitude quickly extended to the place in a small corner of our spare bedroom, which we have recently dedicated to prayer and time with our Lord. It’s a place where my husband and I can now go anytime and enter into silence and solitude with our Lord in prayer.

I had no idea at the outset that I was planning something special. I bought a room divider off the web that I’d seen and liked. Later, I saw an old mirrored window and thought it would fit in somewhere for something. Over a period of months the vision of fashioning a private space in a little 4′ x 6′ corner of an oddly shaped spare room in our home began to take a fuzzy form.

My husband one day shared with me that he was often moved to want to kneel to pray, but had not felt there to be an appropriate place to do that in our home. At once, the fuzziness of my thinking about this little corner began to take form.

I began to search for a kneeling rail we could afford. When I finally learned the correct name for them – prie dieu – I found just the right one. It is an old, used (the more used, the more loved, I like to believe), silvered Art Deco vintage kneeler. It can even be expanded to accommodate two people at prayer together, if we want to at some point.

After finding a little shelf and learning how to hang the relatively heavy mirror/window on to wallboard, all we needed was a standing crucifix to complete our little prayer corner. We traveled to several antique shops, Catholic gift shops, and to various websites over the next several weeks. There were lots of possibilities, but none that seemed just right.

One day, I finally I logged onto Ebay and there it was – the perfectly sized, most beautiful standing crucifix I may have ever seen. It is bronze (I think) and blue from age. It had apparently been buried for some unknown time somewhere in Hawaii and there it was, just waiting for me to claim it for our special place.

I had no real appreciation at the outset of this project for how special the time would be that I would spend in this space or the gratitude I would feel, knowing how He guided each step of my way to its creation. Now, I look forward each morning to beginning my day here with our Lord.

Like our old magnificent church down the street, this special place is filling up with love and reverence.