In the Halls of Religious Institutions

An earnestness for knowing qualifies a man as being spiritually alive. The genesis of that earnestness is curiosity. People walking around hallways of religious institutions, churches, or universities ultimately dogma-centred, walking around without curiosity are contributing tinny acoustics to empty chambers. There is no holiness there, not without the presence, the continued presence and the memory of that presence of the lives of the people of earnestness for the truth, an appetite for knowing, who may then have abode in that knowing in those hallways; who challenged their teachers with a righteous fierceness and laughed with the abandon and vulnerability of windblown saplings.

Or trembled upon hearing light, trembled like a spray of new flowers in their first breeze.

Prayerfulness has nakedness, a vulnerability that insists to the personality of the infinite to act mercifully then to allow a divine intimacy.

If the halls of a religious institution have facilitated such experience, if they have been open to such occasions without oppressive dogma, then these halls may indeed be considered hallowed, having served a blessed function.

And somewhere in these halls may be the echo of songs of truth rendered spontaneously.