"The thickets, I said, send up their praise at dawn."1 I thought of this line from a poem by Wendell Berry as we sat with one of our church elders who was dying of leukemia. We had driven up to visit her in her rural mountain home in North Carolina where she had moved several years ago. She was in bed, looking out her window, and she said that she appreciated the trees each morning because they praised God every day. Her testimony, as she faced death, was to give thanks to God for all levels of praise in her life. She was an artist, and during her 25 years at Oakhurst, she had been a central force in helping us to see the possibilities of using art to help people experience God's presence and to help us find a new way of living in God's presence. On this particular summer day in the mounta…