Sacred Places

From Menletter October 2006

By Tim Baehr

I drive up the narrow road until it dead-ends at a parking lot. Up the hill from the parking lot are a building with communal bathrooms and several modest cabins nestled into the woods. Up and to the left is a large meeting hall.

I am in a sacred place.

On the surface of it, there's nothing so special about this place that makes it sacred. But dig deeper, and the sacredness seeps out of the pores of its existence. For one thing, this place is a few hours from my home in Boston, in a remote corner of the Berkshires, a branch of the Appalachian Mountains in Massachusetts. A rural, remote setting is already, for me, something special. For another thing, the place is beautiful. Trees shelter the cabins. Birds sing and owls hoot. For still another thing, this place and I have a history. I have attended men's retreats here for the past eight years, and the intensity of our work and play seems to have worked itself deep into the fabric of the place.

Other places are sacred to me. There are two sites in Vermont where I spent four days camping alone and fasting, taking in only water. Again, remoteness and beauty (woods and a gorgeous lake) were keys to the sites' sacredness. Also, I did some significant spiritual work in these places, mostly in silence, and accompanied by various plants and critters that were my only companions.

But then there's Rome. It's a major world capital, hardly remote, and with substantial vegetation only in parks. How does a huge city - an entire city - become a sacred place? Well, it is remote in terms of how much time I have to travel to get there. But there are all these people milling about, 24 hours a day. Hardly a place for solitude, and mostly full of strangers. However, at least some of these Roman strangers were kind enough to put up with my rudimentary Italian and treat me like an honored guest in their country. And parts of Rome are extremely beautiful to me and saturated with the memory of ancient lives and events. In some mysterious way, Rome became an instant home for which I am homesick much of the time. I doubt, however, that Romans who live there all the time feel the same way.

I was in one place that had once been a sacred place. It was a decommissioned cloister that stood empty. Pews were stacked against the walls. The confessional alcoves no longer had curtains. The holy water fonts were dry. Beautiful even in its desolation, the place no longer felt sacred. It was lifeless.

Here's the point, I think: Sacred places take us away from our customary haunts, and they involve some kind of spiritual or soulful experience, be it in solitude or with other people. We find them beautiful or evocative, or both. When we enter them, we have a feeling of wholeness and resonance with the place. With or without other people, it is almost a living entity, a friend and guide.

We may have encountered many sacred places, perhaps in a natural setting or perhaps in some totally unexpected location - a bench in front of a painting at a museum, a tree in a city park, a reading room in a public library. They are places that grab hold of our souls, and we feel floods of gratitude and wonder. We feel rich.

Sadly, it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and let the gratitude and wonder fade. The sacred drains out of our lives. Let's visit a couple of those sacred places soon, either by going to them or in our imagination. Let's find some new places. Let's be rich.