The Importance of Sacred Spaces
The primary roll of any sacred space is facilitating a connection. That connection could be with our concept of the divine or the self or even the power cosmic, but in any event there is this idea that the space itself helps facilitate the connection. Arguably it does to some degree seem to impact our willingness to accept connections when they occur within sacred spaces, even when those spaces themselves could not be considered safe.
Sacred places are not always religious, it could be a battlefield, or a place which holds a memory, it could be a quiet place or a crowded sports arena filled with cheer fans. The venue is not what is relevant, the context is just a preview, what matters is the nature of the connection you feel when you are their. How does that connection with awareness lead to knew understanding even when things seemed already so well understood is a key feature to any sacred space.
How they define you in that moment, how your perception of self elevates to a sense of awareness beyond what you had previously understood to be possible even if you have experienced it before, is a completely internal process. This is important to understand because the truth about scared spaces is you can take them with you.
Sacred spaces act on us the way that danger can create a subconscious fight or flight response, they are the situation we need to be to allow our brains to find that sense of communion, of common purpose, of both within and without. They are the eternal stimulus which gives rise to the conditions our brains need put themselves in to find that essential flow state, not to become one with the sense of place, to become one with a sense of awareness and understanding, of comprehension.
Perhaps in some ways they help to give a sense of transition between the abstract and the physical, they help to constrain the limits of our imagination to those within the boundaries of their dominion. This too is important because behavior is a learned process for people, and the model can become strained and hard to understand for people if it relies to heavily on the abstract. This is why psychology experiments rely on showing children a model behavior they wish to study rather than just explaining it to them.
One of my sacred spaces is my writing desk. If you were to look at it you might consider it slightly cluttered, maybe even little confused or arguably even messy, I can get all of that, but to me it is absolutely beautiful. It’s curious to find that when you surround yourself with things you appreciate they can almost amplify themselves, until they would look good to you in almost any configuration.
That’s how it is with my desk.
Then when there are times like now when the house is still and the world is quiet, it’s hard not to glance about at something I do not appreciate, something in which I have found a sense of symmetry and beauty that perhaps not everyone else can see, but I can. For my own reasons.
It is those reasons that can elevate something as simple as a writing desk into a sacred space, into a place where our sense of awareness connects with our sense of self and as we look without at the world around us, we find something within ourselves. This is the power of sacred spaces, they can help us hold on or find a sense of meaning, they can buy us the time we need to get over the next obstacle to finding the connection we need, we all need, to some degree or another.
Maybe that’s what truly makes us human, being connected. Maybe sacred spaces like a cathedral or a meadow or a simple writing desk can help us find our own version of it.
Maybe that’s okay.
Maybe…