Sunday, May 23, 2010

Sacred Space

April Fool’s Day seems a fitting day to begin a Sabbatical. i hit the road to the Benedictine community of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, not too far from a sign for Lake Wobegon of Garrison Keillor fame. i’ve been working through Joan Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict, which offers a cycle of daily readings of the old saint’s rules for Benedictine monasteries and Chittister’s insightful commentary on the rule.

St John's Abbey church



Chapter 52 of Benedict’s rule is The Oratory of the Monastery, and emphasizes that the place of worship is a place set aside. Chittister offers the advice of a creative writing teacher: “Write every single day at the same time and in the very same place. Whether you have anything to say or not, go there and sit and do nothing if necessary, until the very act of sitting there at your writer’s time in your writer’s place releases the writing energy in you.” It is only by making space for a thing, whether the thing is writing or an encounter with the Holy, that the thing can be experienced.



The church where i live and work, like many in the United Church of Canada, has undergone a renovation to make the sanctuary more user-friendly for the performing arts. Multi-purpose space is all the rage, and makes utilitarian sense. After all, we worship once a week, not four times daily like the Benedictines.



What is sacred space, and how does it become sacred? Who decides?

mosque/cathedral of Cordoba


The Roman Catholic cathedral in Cordoba was one of the world’s most beautiful mosques before the reconquista, the program to wrest Spain back from the Moors and secure the country for Christianity. For three centuries of Moorish rule, the mosque had been a site of worship and community in a city where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side. The mosque was once a pilgrimage site for devout Muslims, second only to Mecca itself. When Cordoba was conquered, the mosque was slated to become a cathedral. And so, plunked in the middle of one of the world’s most stunningly beautiful spaces with its more than 800 marble pillars and astonishing mosaic, tile and inscription, is a cathedral. A cathedral that would have been alright on another site, its own site, but here looks like a carbuncle. This embarrassing bit of Christian imperialism is only somewhat softened by the fact that the mosque stole its pillars from a Visigoth church, who in turn had stolen the pillars from a Roman temple. The concept of co-existence didn’t have much traction during the Spanish Inquisition.



But what of today’s temples? i recall the excitement in the Toronto of my youth when the CN Tower was built – then the world’s tallest free-standing structure. But it wasn’t long until the TD Bank built a monolith of its own – you guessed it, taller than the CN Tower. These are temples of another empire whose enterprises also aspire to world domination.



What is sacred space, and how does it become sacred? Who decides? Is interfaith sacred space possible, and, if so, how will we get there?