Like many things in our lives we have a very us/them relationship with Sacred Space. For the most part we see it as other than us, residing in buildings specifically designed to create and contain it such as churches, existing in nature such as awe inspiring mountains, water falls, rivers, or canyons, and forming temporarily in large public gatherings such as the Presidential inauguration or Burning Man.
We do not see Sacred Space as something that connects with our day-to-day life. Our living spaces, our work spaces, our mundane doings see to have nothing to do with sacred anything and so if we want to partake of the sacred we need to stop what we’re doing, change tack, and do something to bring sacrality into our lives such as prayer or go somewhere that sacrality resides. We look at people who live in a sacred manner as ‘other’ such as Tibetan monks or Catholic nuns or those who live in ashrams in India seeing the convergence of sacrality with life as removing people from real living. Sacrality is seen as being about being other than real and not being connected with this life.
But that’s and artificial separation that we maintain. Most indigenous cultures have difficulty even discussion spirituality with outsiders because they do not have this concept of separation between life and the sacred. My own culture has no word for religion. Our spirituality is how we live our lives and our lives are sacred. And this refers to us now, not just to our dead ancestors that used to hunt deer and wear leather and birch bark. In fact, I remember one of my elders using a hot glue gun when helping a few of us construct some ritual items and the shock students showed. In exasperation she told them succinctly, “If the elders would have had this, it would have been a sacred item!” Which is the truth. Things and traditions aren’t sacred because they were used in a sacred way, they are sacred because we imbue them with sacrality. We honor them and open our sacred selves to them in order to relate with them via our souls. And there is no reason that we need to become a monk or a nun to do this in our daily lives. We don’t have to give up living to live in a sacred way. We just need to honor ourselves as sacred.
How would you do things differently if you saw yourself as sacred in the same way as the Grand Canyon, Chatre Cathedral, Stone Henge?