About a month ago, someone told me he looked at the sky seven times every day. He said it calmed him down and smoothed out anxieties. It wasn’t a spiritual thing. He called it “a way to spend time with myself.”

Since then, I’ve tried to look at the sky more often. While standing in my new living room, walking through humid Florida, or driving past shuttered stores and take-out restaurants, I’ll suddenly notice colors and pause for a moment. I don’t count to thirty or take ten deep breaths or anything like that. I don’t even pause, really. I keep following the car ahead of me as I glance upward through the windshield. It’s more about my background attention. A net of powerlines and traffic lights and road signs tie me in place like lashings on a ship, but beyond them, beyond the apartments and office buildings that line San Marco Boulevard, I can see open sky. The other week, it was solid blue, as bright as baptism. In the midst of that expanse, I saw a single whisp of cloud. Then I found a parking spot, sanitized my hands, and put on a mask. I returned to ceilings of lights, HVAC systems, and to-do lists.

When I need to see a book without reading it, I’ll spin the page upside down so the letters look like cuneiform and the ideas fall out. I’ll spread pens, highlighters, and half a ream of upside-down manuscript across a table and flip through it without reading a single word. Each page gives the reader a window into the story, but I’m not reading—I’m cleaning, and it’s easier to fix those windows without the author dancing in front of them. I brush off rivers and word stacks, buff out awkward hyphens, and wipe away excess word spacing. I clean smudges, more or less, to help the reader see the story without distraction.

Liturgy, mystery, and the natural world intersect at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Renton. They’re all important—liturgy, mystery, nature—and most of us involve all three in our lives, although rarely at the same time. Liturgy belongs to Sunday mornings. Mystery sticks close to  music, art, and poetry. Nature emerges on weekend trips to the mountains or evening walks through the park. St. Luke noticed this separation, and it responded with one-of-a-kind evening liturgies. Or, more accurately, four-of-a-kind. Four times a year on the equinoxes and solstices, St. Luke, Renton, combines liturgy, mystery, and nature in an evening service open to everyone.

You won’t hear a sermon at these liturgies. There’s no Eucharist, either. Instead, you’ll hear poems by Gary Snyder and John O’Donohue, and readings from Marilynne Robinson and John Steinbeck. You’ll find visual art, chant, and meditation from all sorts of cultures and genres. These liturgies create space for a mystical experience of God—something more ethereal than the usual liturgy, more applied than the general artistic world, and more present than our typical relationship with nature.

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