Sacred Spaces

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” – Exodus 3:5

I’m in a purgy mood. Usually what this means is that I have cabin fever from the weather being less than stellar. When I stay inside for too long, I start looking around and thinking about all the things I could be getting rid of. My friend calls this “nesting:” the constant need to rearrange your space because you simply need to do something. And when the weather is rainy (as it has been for what seems like always lately), I do a lot of nesting (much to my husband’s chagrins).

            My purgy mood has carried over into my office as well. As per my friend’s suggestion (the same one who calls it nesting), I started with magazines. I have a lot of denominational magazines that come through my office mail and sit on my shelf. I usually skim through them and put them on the shelf, thinking I’ll read through them when I have more time. This doesn’t always happen. So, I sat down at my desk to glance through magazines and decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss. In some cases, I tore articles out if there was only one article I wanted, and I scanned it to my computer so I could get recycle the paper. One of the articles that I came across was called “Sacred Space.”

            The article is about creating spaces for people of all ages to connect with God. The writer describes a sacred space as experiential: its purpose is to “provide a space set apart for persons of all ages to be attentive to and experience God.” The article looks at it as a space for finding God during Lent, but really I think finding sacred space is something we can do at any time of the year. When I think of places in my experience that have been sacred (places where I have felt God in deep and profound ways), I think of hospital rooms. I think of the Catholic convent in Illinois where I went for silent retreats. I think of sitting in a garden on a rock by the lake and watching a turtle emerge and submerge. Sacred spaces are often quiet. Sometimes they are where we ask deep questions.

            In his TedTalk, Canadian architect Siamak Hariri asks the question, “How do you design sacred space today?” in a world that is so secular. In his work, he says he is intrigued by the idea of a reaction of the heart. It feels intimate. When looking for a sacred space, that is what Hariri looks for: a reaction of the heart. The writer of the article in the magazine calls the experience of sacred space visceral. Knowing that a space gives us that kind of intimate reaction – a reaction of the heart – makes me aware of two things.

First, it makes me aware of the fact that any place can be a sacred space. A few weeks ago I stopped in Cleveland (OH) on my way to Illinois at the James Garfield National Monument. James Garfield, the 20^th president of the United States, is buried in a huge memorial monument in a gorgeous old cemetery. Inside the monument you can go upstairs to a balcony that gives you a view of Cleveland that few besides birds and people in planes get to see. In the main rotunda, there’s a series of Tiffany windows and a sculpture of Garfield. From there, you go down a spiral marble staircase to the crypt where the man himself is interred with his wife and the urns holding the cremains of his daughter and son-in-law. As I made my way down that staircase, I came across a fieldtrip of elementary school kids. They stood in a circle and a curator was telling them the story of how a man shot Garfield in a train station. I could still hear her talking as I went into the crypt and viewed the caskets.

The room is circular. There are iron gates around the caskets, which sit on marble pillars above the ground. I took a few pictures (as I do) and by the time I finished my traditional moment of silence, the field trip kids were coming in. I could hear the curator telling them to be silent. In single file, they came in and paraded around the room, looking at the caskets and the two urns. They were silent except for the shuffling of feet. Maybe the space was always sacred, but in that moment as the kids walked around me, I wondered how many of them had seen caskets before. There’s something holy about facing death, even if it’s the death of someone you never met because he died in 1881. While the fieldtrip going on upstairs was noisy with the kids talking and filling in their questionnaires from the posters taped around the upper rotunda about Garfield’s life (really, you don’t know how much echoing happens in a place until there’s a fieldtrip of elementary school kids involved), the downstairs fieldtrippers were silent. For me, that was a sacred space. Maybe for some of those kids, it was a sacred space, too, even if they didn’t know to call it that.

The second thing that sacred space makes me aware of is how objective it is. A sacred space for one person will not be a sacred space for someone else. Not everyone will see walking around a crypt as sacred. Not everyone wants to step in a church sanctuary and not everyone connects to God in the same way. The reaction of the heart that Hariri talks about is not the same for everyone, and I think that’s okay. God made each of us unique, and the ways that we experience God are as unique as our personalities. Because it is objective, it reminds me to mindful of how I treat a space that might not be sacred to me, but is definitely sacred to someone else.

Sacred places connect us to God. They connect us to deeper truths of the universe, to each other. Of course, we can get into trouble when we make something sacred for the sake of that thing. In pastoral circles, we call those “sacred cows.” When the space that was sacred to us ceases to be about the beyondness of that space, the space is no longer sacred. Our spaces can change. I hate to say this as a pastor who loves my church, but sometimes, the sacred space isn't in our church sanctuary. And that's okay. I hope to help create sacred space during worship, and I believe strongly in communal worship, but sometimes, we need to find sacred space outside of the church building.

I continue to look for spaces that are sacred. One of the cool things that God does is show you where those sacred places are – and like Moses, who discovered the burning bush in the wilderness, we sometimes find that the sacred spaces are in places we never expected.

Consider: Where is your sacred space? Where is that space where you feel most deeply connected to God? What elements do you need to have in place to consider a place sacred? Do you have places that used to be sacred spaces that have transformed into something else now? 

                                      James Garfield National Monument in Cleveland, Ohio