Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
Michael Cochren spent his early twenties playing four-hour sets in VFW halls and moose lodges across southern Indiana, absorbing gospel, big band, and Jackson Browne in equal measure. Now he channels all of it into sacred music, arguing with his whole artistic life that the church deserves our very best craft and devotion.
That question of what sacred spaces deserve weighs differently when we consider a historic Roman Catholic church in Canada reduced to ash this week, allegedly by a sixty-eight-year-old man now facing arson charges. It is the latest in a long series of attacks on churches there, and it asks us honestly what we lose when places of gathered memory are taken from us by violence.
Meanwhile, archaeologists working along an ancient Roman road have uncovered a statue twenty-five hundred years old, repurposed at some point as ordinary paving stone. Someone once walked over it without a second thought, never knowing they were treading on devotion itself, a reminder that meaning has a way of outlasting the indifference laid on top of it.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
