I was in New Life’s Community Free Store the other day and found a book called The Ice Cream Store. I scooped (!) it up. I loved reading Alligator Pie to my kids when they were young. Here was another book written by Canadian author Dennis Lee that I could enjoy reading to my grandchildren. One of my favourite poems in the book is “The Secret Place.” What a wonderful invitation to return to God in the secret place where we were made. Thanks, Dennis!
The Secret Place
by Dennis Lee
There’s a place I go, inside myself,
Where nobody else can be,
And none of my friends can tell it’s there–
Nobody knows but me.
It’s hard to explain the way it feels,
Or even where I go.
It isn’t a place in time or space,
But once I’m there, I know.
It’s tiny, it’s shiny, it can’t be seen,
But it’s big as the sky at night…
I try to explain and it hurts my brain
But once I’m there, it’s right.
There’s a place I know inside myself,
And it’s neither big nor small,
And whenever I go, it feels as though
I never left at all.
Even now that I am grown up, I can lose myself on the circumference of life. But when I return to that tiny, shiny, spacious place where God welcomes me, I am home.
“My frame was not hidden from you, I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.”
– Psalm 139:15
“God is the still-point of a turning world.”
-Thomas E. Clarke, SJ, Finding Grace at the Centre
An Everyday Pilgrim 