Sacred spaces

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 24, 2014

For every people on earth, there are places where power gathers. This mountain, this street, this tree. How can we participate in the recognition and creation of such places?

I watch the news and feel overwhelmed. Brutality in the Middle East, some of which we are enabling by sending arms which will be used against Palestinians. Some of the rebels we were talking about arming in Syria turn out to be part of a group even Al-Kaeda refuses to recognize. We remove a violent and remorseless dictator and it’s as if we’ve lit a match and burned the structures that were holding chaos at bay. When you find yourself wondering whether it takes a brutal dictator to keep other brutal ideologues from slaughtering more innocents than the dictator did, it’s time for some deep reflection and going back to basics. When you feel that you have worked for years to recognize and heal from your own inner racism, and you see other people still venomous with it, when you realize that, even if we all worked to get rid of our individual racism, it’s still there in our institutions: the media, the courts, the police, capitalism itself, and you just want either to start screaming, preaching, and prophesying about it or to lie down quietly and make Zen circles with a brush dipped in black ink, it’s time for some deep reflection and going back to basics.

When you see your government talking about defeating an ideology with air strikes, when everyone knows that this will add outrage and righteousness to the ideology and convert more people to its precepts, when you don’t really know how an ideology can be defeated, knowing that you can’t even argue with your own family and change their ideologies, it’s time for deep reflection and going back to basics. What are the basics?

Lao Tze says

“if there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.”

I want to talk to you this morning about creating sacred space, a place in your home, in your yard, that is especially for the life of your soul. People from ancient times have had altars in their homes. People from Lithuania to Nepal, from Congo to California have small tables, shelves, book cases where a small figure of one of the aspects of God sits, where there are photographs of ancestors, bits of stone and wood, feathers and berries and beads arranged. Offerings of fruit, flowers, or candles speak of gratitude and reverence. Sometimes these spaces are small. Sometimes they are large. In Scotland are ancient circles of standing stones. In many places, there are stacks of stones. Temples, gardens, shrines. One of the voices articulating the reasons people make sacred space is Tim Seal, in a book called “Roadside Religion.”

Tim Seal is a young man with the same hobby as mine: visiting and interviewing folks on the religious fringes. On the front cover of his book is a photograph of a structure of red-brown girders with a large blue and white sign in front of them:”Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here!” Beal is a religious scholar married to a Presbyterian minister; they load up their two kids in the summer and go on road trips to see people’s expressions of their interaction with the Divine, expressions these folks invite the public to interact with by putting them right beside the road. The family visited Holy Land, USA, in Virginia; the Golgotha Fun Park and Biblical mini-golf in Kentucky; and Noah’s Ark of Safety in Maryland.

He writes: “These places are as deeply personal as they are public. At the creative heart and soul of each is a religious imagination trying to give outward form to inner experience.”

Yes, but what does “sacred” mean, you ask? You might be sorry you wanted to know. People have been thinking about it for a long time. Many First Nations writings say “everything is sacred,” yet there are still holy mountains, burial places, medicine wheels, and ritual areas.

From Roadside Religion:

“Drawn from the Latin sacer, the most basic meaning of “sacred” is “set apart.” But what sets it apart as such? Different theorists of religion find very different answers. For Emile Durkheim, the answer was sociological. The sacred is that which symbolizes and indeed creates the social and moral coherence of the community. It is … that which a social group (a clan, a church) sets apart to represent and create unity. For other [theorists], the answer is phenomenological, that is, it’s a matter of understanding how the sacred is perceived and experienced …. French philosopher Georges Bataille …. described the sacred as that which is experienced as radical otherness, representing a realm (real or imaginary,) of animal intimacy that threatens to annihilate the social and symbolic order of things. For historian of religion Mircea Eliade, too, the sacred is wholly other, but he focuses on the religious person’s experience of it as an experience of transcendence that serves to orient her within a sacred cosmic order. “The sacred is where you encounter God, The Holy, where you feel awe, where things have a flash of making sense to you, where you have a feeling of connection to that which is larger than yourself, where you suddenly have new information that makes a shift inside you and things are different now.

When you have that feeling is it inside you or in the place itself? Are there real sacred places, springs and mountains, coming together of ley lines or a vortex of energy or are there just places that have been invested with meaning by the people who carried within themselves a human urge to be part of something larger than themselves? I don’t know the answer to that. No one does.

Have you even been to a place you felt was sacred? There is a spring down the hill behind Nazareth Presbyterian Church that is sacred. I used to work there, and I would slip off down the hill and worship there when I could get away from church responsibilities. It drew me. It felt like a responsibility to myself to get there.

Sometimes objects feel sacred. I don’t know if they are sacred in themselves or because of energies invested in them by people. When you watch the opening credits of the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird” you hear a girl humming, and the camera pans over a harmonica, a pearl necklace, a carved doll, a whistle, a broken pocket watch. Some children collect feathers, stones, beads, berries strung together. Those objects are sacred if they have mana in them. “Mana” is an anthropological word for this buzz of holiness that seems to accrue to certain objects or places in human groups. Another word for that same buzz is “numinous.”

Making sacred space can be a large undertaking or a tiny one. Iwant to encourage you to think about making a place in your house or yard that is sacred space. How do you do that? Start by making an intention that this space be set apart from other spaces. Your ancient instincts will help you. Put a beautiful cloth there, some stones, pieces of wood, a pocket watch, some beads or berries, photographs of your family and friends, reminders of times you want to mark in your life, reminders of something you learned or something that changed you, then add flowers and light candles to give it freshness, to interact with the space.

Sometimes your altar will be just for honoring those changes, those people.

Sometimes your altar will be a thank you, for getting through and illness or a divorce, for getting though a difficult period with a child or a friend, maybe it will be a thank you for life being in a good place right now, or just for life. Being.

Your altar might be a prayer, a tangible, concrete prayer or wish or intention that you put out into the Universe, that you present to God, that you communicate with your Higher Power, or your deepest/best/highest self. Some say there are parts of your brain that think in images rather than concepts, If you are trying to make changes in your life, in your self, they say it is good to have all parts of your mind and heart with you in this undertaking. Making your prayers concrete, in images, helps all the parts of your mind understand what you are trying to ask for, what you are trying to invite in. A friend wanted clarity, so she put a pair of her grandmother’s glasses on her altar, as a tangible reminder of what she was asking for. If you are building something in your life, put some sticks on top of one another like a building, or if you are trying to get rid of something, write on a candle or scratch into the wax what you are wanting to melt away. Then burn the candle (never leave a burning candle unattended) and say to God, to the Universe, to your inner mind “As this candle burns away so let this habit or this person’s influence melt away from my life.” Then, every time you see that candle getting smaller, your deep mind, your whole conscious and unconscious, sees that and says, “Oh, I want that influence, that habit, that connection, to get smaller.”

A sacred space in your home reminds you that the Holy is in the dailiness of your life, not just in certain times and places. You can remind yourself that your home is a sacred place by having a mezuzah for the door of your house, in the Jewish tradition. That is a small container of a verse of scripture that you attach to the doorframe and you touch it when you come into your house. You can have a bowl of water by the door, if your pets won’t knock it over, and touch your hand to the water whenever you come in, like holy water. A sacred space reminds you that you are more than a work machine, a family caregiver, a lover, more than yourself. It reminds you that you are part of the Mystery, and that Mystery is close at hand. It reminds you that you are a partner with the Mystery in creating peace, which is a dynamic, hard working, soul growing enterprise.

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