Something I wrote earlier this week keeps nudging at me for more attention. I wrote in my post on the Tao that while in Boston I “felt starved for a sacred space in which to be.” And later, of my time at Grace Cathedral, “I was ready to appreciate this sacred space and its open-hearted hospitality in a way I couldn’t have last year, even had Boston’s diocese flung thirty church doors open.”

It’s this notion of sacred space that I want to return to.

So far as I can tell, people need sacred places to return to – whether these be literal houses of worship, or simply spots out in nature, a favorite friend’s or grandparent’s house, a curve on the highway where an epiphany came to us fifteen years ago. Sacred spaces connect us with something deep and meaningful; they feed our souls.

At the same time, something seems incongruous, somehow, about dividing our world into places that are sacred, and places that are not. I’m drawn to the way that contemplatives in many traditions have discovered sacredness glistening from everything – glinting off of dewdrops and teardrops, presidents and bums, gutters and rivers and church bells and whore houses. Holiness – the divine – being everywhere the attentive soul can look (the darkness that also pervades I’ll leave for another post).

I came across a passage in Secret Life of Bees today (a book I highly recommend; this is my third time through) that I think joins these two ideas well (the idea that we need sacredness in its particularity, even as it pulses more generally around us). August (a character in the book) is an African American nearing old age. In her parlor sits a statue of the Virgin Mary that one of her ancestors discovered in a riverbed after years of praying to God for rescue and consolation from the miseries of slavery. August’s ancestor placed the statue in the praise house of his community, telling his fellow slaves that “he knew the Lord God had sent her, but he didn’t know who she was.”

The book continues the story of the statue: “Now, the oldest of the slaves was a woman named Pearl. She walked with a stick, and when she spoke, everyone listened. She got to her feet and said, ‘This here is the mother of Jesus.’

“Everyone knew the mother of Jesus was named Mary, and that she’d seen suffering of every kind. That she was strong and constant and had a mother’s heart. And here she was, sent to them on the same waters that had brought them here in chains. It seemed to them she knew everything they suffered.

“So the people cried and danced and clapped their hands. They went one at a time and touched their hands to her chest, wanting to grab on to the solace in her heart.

“They did this every Sunday in the praise house, dancing and touching her chest, and eventually they painted a red heart on her breast so the people would have a heart to touch.

“Our Lady filled their hearts with fearlessness and whispered to them plans of escape. The bold ones fled, finding their way north, and those who didn’t lived with a raised fist in their hearts. And if ever it grew weak, they would only have to touch her heart again.” p. 109-110

From then on, this statue became an important part of August’s ancestor’s community, and right on to the time the novel’s story is told, relatives, and then friends, of August gathered weekly to remember Mary’s story, and gain strength from her sacred presence.

At one point August tells another character in the book, 14-year-old Lily, about the true nature of the statue.

“Well,” August said, “you know she’s really just the figurehead off an old ship, but the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over. Really, her spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way.”

Lily tells us her reaction:

“I had never thought of it like that, and it gave me a shocked feeling, like maybe I had no idea what kind of world I was actually living in, and maybe the teachers at my school didn’t know either, the way they talked about everything being nothing but carbon and oxygen and mineral, the dullest stuff you can imagine. I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised Marys sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about that people could rub and touch, only we didn’t recognize them.” pp. 141-142

This is a storied way of saying what my view of the sacred is becoming, and that I honor my own and others’ need for “sacred spaces in which to be,” even as I want to honor the holiness that I think I hear pulsing everywhere around us. Like August, I think it’s everywhere, and yet it also gets concentrated in certain people and places, and just “beams out at you in a special way.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 29th, 2004 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.