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. 

Understanding One Thing is to Understand Everything

Although not always expressed the same way, here is an idea I heard reference to from time to time through the years I lived in Japan:

The Zen Perspective

The words above are attributed to Suzuki Shunryu, a Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. In 1962 Suzuki (1904~71) founded the San Francisco Zen Center, which was the first Zen monastery outside Asia.

Suzuki was also the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and last year the 50^th anniversary edition of that book was published.

Fifty years ago when I first heard the idea encapsulated in Suzuki’s words, I didn’t know they were rooted in a Zen concept. But perhaps that helps explain the use made of koans in Zen. To understand one thing, such as a koan, leads to satori (enlightenment), that is, understanding everything.

Granted, there are lingering problems here; still, it is an interesting perspective.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Perspective

I have long liked, and often quoted, the widely known words of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning:  

Seeing depth, or transcendence, in the ordinary is what Barrett Browning was emphasizing, and that is likely true for Suzuki also. The problem, and shame, is that there are so many who are content to just pluck blackberries, never seeing more than the obvious.

In this connection, I recently happened to read this important statement by Henri Nouwen: “. . . the whole of nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality far beyond itself” (Seeds of Hope, 1989, p. 100). Unfortunately, so many people don’t see the sacramental nature of the universe.

When we don’t fully see/understand “one thing,” we are unable to see/understand “everything.”

Gifty’s Perspective

Originally, I planned to write this whole blog article about Gifty, the precocious central character of Yaa Gyasi’s fascinating novel Transcendent Kingdom (2020). Gifty, like the author, was born to Ghanaian parents and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama.

But unlike author Gyasi (b. 1989), who has an MFA degree, Gifty is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction.

In her experiments on the brains of mice, Gifty realized that in the case of humans, at least, there is something more to human consciousness than just the physical brain.

For example, Gifty asks, “ . . . if the brain can’t account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for ‘us’ to feel and think then what is ‘us’?” (p. 197).

At the very end of the novel, Gifty says, “I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption.”

Gifty likely didn’t know anything about Barrett Browning’s poems nor much, if anything, about Zen. But she seemed to intuit that to understand one thing is to understand everything.

What about us, now?