Reflecting the Sacred: Sacred Space
When I was being trained as a writer, teachers would make clear to us that if you want readers to be transported from where they sit reading your book to the plane of imagination where your book is set, it’s the details that are the vehicle you need. You can write that a woman entered her cousin’s home. Or you can write that the woman unwrapped her worn shawl from around her face, revealing a relieved smile as she pushed open the sturdy wooden door of her cousin’s home.
I think it’s the same way with our spiritual lives. We can sit in church. We can walk in the woods. We can watch our favorite movies. But pay attention to what happens when you let yourself slow down and take in the details of a place – whether that place is real or fictional. You may find, as I do, that the details better connect, orient, and move you.
It’s just a little detail but at the end of today’s passage the writer of the Gospel of Luke tells us, “And Mary remained with her, Elizabeth, about three months and then returned to her home.” The details give us a context, in this case a setting, for all the words we have heard.
This beautiful, revolutionary song Mary sings in today’s scripture passage takes place in a setting that could be considered inconsequential. She is singing after all not in a palace but in her cousin’s home.
While those of us who hold Jesus and John the Baptist to have been history changers might consider the meeting of these two pregnant women to be sparkling with sacred importance, it could also be said that in terms of earthly power, these women, this moment, and this place were of little importance at all.
I have lived in six different states and nearly every place I have ever lived has been considered nowhere - that is a place considered unimportant in terms of global politics or economic power. Rural Pennsylvania, small town Indiana, and even suburban Chicago could all be seen this way. And yet, they are sacred places to me. The land, the history, and the people of all these places have gotten under my skin. Through DNA and food and friendship they are both literally and metaphorically part of who I am.
I know God dwells in all these places because I have seen the glory of God reverberating off wooded mountain valleys, vast expanses of grass, thickly clustered buildings designed with eclectic architectural styles, and even off long passes of pavement for my bike to travel along in relative safety.
I know we humans tend to have places where we find it easier to encounter the Holy One who is in and beyond all things, people, and time. And I can’t say that forest preserves, churches, libraries, museums, weight rooms, and coffee shops haven’t provided special territory where I can consistently travel to encounter again the eternal foundation of all existence. But, at least for me, the truth is that all existence and every place is sacred. Even if we have certain places it is easy to call sacred, there is no place God does not dwell. God is on the battlefield. God is in the prison cell. God is in the OR. God is in the flyover states and every place in between.
If we let them, I believe those places we name as sacred can remind us of the sacredness of every place. They can help us bear the details and reality even of the most hard to dwell in and full of suffering places of our world.
Journalists, too, know the power of details to transport us from passive readers or listeners to people who can empathize with someone halfway around the world. It was the description of babies being pulled out of incubation to evacuate hospitals in Gaza that got me while driving one day. I had to turn off the radio and pull over to the side of the road; I was so upset. I think what got me was not only that detail but the way that detail helped me feel the weight of all the other deaths and violence in the region that I feel all but powerless to stop.
It’s hard for me to really fully comprehend that in a part of the world where the Christmas story took place and that three religions call “holy” unspeakable violence has been roiling in fresh and horrific ways since October. The three religions that call that land holy all trace their spiritual if not ethnic and cultural roots back to the Abraham Mary speaks of in her song of praise and joy. It is God’s remembrance of and mercy toward Abraham’s descendants that Mary praises.
We could certainly use that mercy today. Mercy is what seems to be in short supply among Abraham’s descendants on whatever shores they stand. There seems to be little room for nuance or disagreement certainly in the midst of the violence itself but also here at home where friends and neighbors scream at each other or are even moved to murder as in the case of the young boy killed by his anti-Palestinian hate-motivated landlord.
Is there mercy in the space where we are right? Or does our righteousness intoxicate us into echoing the very behaviors we claim to abhor?
What Mary says in her Magnifcat has been transposed into various beautiful music pieces throughout time. It is held sacred. But do we look and listen close enough to the details? I think if we do we notice just how troublesome her words really are. She is praising God after all for bringing “down the powerful from their thrones and lift[ing] up the lowly; … “for filling the hungry with good things and sen[ding] the rich away empty.”
Her words are troublesome in the sense of what the late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis called “good trouble,” for they spell trouble for the unjust world order. These words ought to afflict our comfortable places and comfort our afflicted places. Brethren biblical scholars Christina Bucher and Robert W. Neff found this reversal to be so central to their understanding of this gospel that they subtitled their recently published Luke and Acts commentary book “Turning the World Upside Down.”
What would a world turned upside down mean in our time? Would it mean simply violence perpetrated by different people? Or would it mean that we start to see the details of each other’s lives in ways that lead us to merciful co-existence and conflict resolution? Would it mean that we learn to share space with people unlike us?
Maybe then we would recognize that the spaces we share are truly sacred. Maybe then like Mary our souls would magnify the Lord, reflect the sacred, and truly rejoice in God who connects us to each other no matter where we are.
May it be so. Amen.
