What is and Where is Sacred Space?

Ever since my pastor preached a few weeks ago about sacred space, I have been thinking, off and on, about that topic. Are there certain places that are sacred? Can we come into contact with God (by whatever name God is called) in some places more than others? 

Sacred places/spaces are commonly thought to be religious structures (church buildings, temples, shrines, etc.). Christians are often told that the church building is the “house of God.”

In the Old Testament, Bethel means “house of God.” Jacob dreamed of a ladder leading to heaven, and he named that out-in-the-open space Bethel. It was a sacred space, for he experienced God’s presence there. (See Genesis 28:10~19).

Centuries later under King Solomon, the Temple was built in Jerusalem, and it was deemed the dwelling place of God on earth. Thus, it was considered to be a space more sacred than anywhere else.

In spite of the fact that the first Christians had no church buildings at all, over the past 18 centuries Christians have built increasingly elaborate structures and many, including many church leaders, consider the sanctuary (=sacred space) in those buildings to be where God is met.

When I was a boy, at the beginning of the Sunday morning worship services, the church choir often sang the words of Habakkuk 2:20: “The Lord is in his holy temple . . . let all the earth keep silent before Him.”

Looking back, though, the most sacred spaces/places for me were not in a church building. Sacred spaces for me and many others, such as Jacob, were out in the open not inside a religious structure. For Moses, it was by a burning bush. Indeed, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning sensed,

“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.

That seems to be the way it was for Shug in The Color Purple (which I wrote about recently). She asked Celie if she had ever found God in church. “I never did,” Shug said. “Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God” (Kindle, p. 192).

The sacred spaces where I have sensed God “speaking” most clearly were where I was by myself, mowing hay on the farm where I grew up, driving alone across Missouri or Kentucky, walking down a street in Japan, etc.

That doesn’t mean that attending worship services in church buildings was valueless. Far from it. Still, my most important experiences of God have not been in some sort of “sacred” building or while engaged in some “sacred” activity with other people.

Those most important experiences have been times of prayer and have been when alone with God. For that reason, I believe that any and every place has the potential of being a sacred space. Thus, as I wrote while listening to my pastor’s sermon,

Where there’s prayer, God is there;
The prayer place is sacred space.

Sacred space is abundant when we practice the presence of God. I certainly can’t claim to have achieved what the 17th-century French monk known as Brother Lawrence called “the practice of the presence of God.” (His brief book by that name was published in 1692, a year after his death.)

Brother Lawrence spent much of his life as a lowly monastic kitchen aide. But he “resolved to make the love of God the end of all his actions.” Such was possible by practicing the presence of God in whatever he was doing.

Wherever we sense the presence of God, as Brother Lawrence did in the kitchen, as Shug did in the fields of purple flowers, as I have done in various places, all are sacred spaces.

Meeting God in any sacred space, though, is never just for the purpose of receiving a blessing from God. After Jacob met God at Bethel, God said to him, “Every family of earth will be blessed because of you . . . .”

God blesses us in sacred spaces so we can become a blessing to others, sharing God’s love. 

Admiring the Color Purple

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 movie by the same name was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Last month June and I both re-read the book and watched the movie again—and were impressed again by both. 

Alice Walker is a talented novelist and poet. She is also a lifetime social activist and the one who coined the term “womanist” (in “Coming Apart,” her 1979 short story).

Walker was born in Georgia, the youngest of her sharecropper parents’ eight children. She was an excellent student, and upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship to prestigious (HBCU) Spelman College in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was one of her professors there.

Under the direction of SNCC, Alice and many other Spelman students joined the effort to desegregate Atlanta. They were supported by Prof. Zinn—who subsequently was fired in the summer of 1963. Because of that, Alice transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and graduated in 1965.

Through the 1970s Walker was active both as a teacher and an author, and then 40 years ago, in 1982, The Color Purple, her third novel was published. The next year she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Color Purple is a feminist work about Celie, an abused and uneducated African American woman’s struggle for empowerment. According to Britannica, among other things the novel was “praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of Black English Vernacular.”

Here is a short conversation between Shug and Celie that shows some of that vernacular—and indicates where the title of the book came from:

Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it (Kindle ed., p. 195).

The same Britannica article goes on to say, “The Color Purple movingly depicts the growing up and self-realization of Celie, who overcomes oppression and abuse to find fulfillment and independence.”  

The novel is a classic, for there are many today who need to overcome oppression and abuse the same as Celie did 100 years ago. More broadly, as a theology professor in Australia writes, The Color Purple is

both a cry of rage and protest against the injustices and inhumanity we humans inflict on one another, and a stubborn affirmation of hope in the midst of suffering, of endurance against all odds, of a kind of triumph in the end as we become more and more who we truly are.*

The Color Purple is also a book about God. The above quote from the book is just one of many referring to God.

The author herself said in a 2006 interview, “Twenty-five-years later, it still puzzles me that The Color Purple is so infrequently discussed as a book about God. About ‘God’ versus ‘the God image.’”**

The blogger cited above explains that Walker clearly holds a panentheist view of God in which “the divine is deeply immanent within everything, a faithful creator and life-giving Spirit. She revolts against the intellectual idolatry that reduces God to the white, to the male, to the human.”

And Walker herself states that the “core teaching of the novel” is delivered by Shug, who says to Celie, “I believe God is everything, . . . Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it” (Kindle ed., p. 194).

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Look how the wild flowers grow. They don't work hard to make their clothes. But I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn't as well clothed as one of them” (Matt. 6:27-28, CEB).

Perhaps when he said this, Jesus was looking out over a field of wild flowers and admiring the color purple.

_____

* Michael O’Neil in a 2016 blog post.

** From the Introduction of the book in the Kindle version (loc. 80).

Note: For an abundance of information about Alice Walker and her outstanding book, see https://bookanalysis.com/alice-walker/the-color-purple/.