November 4, 2015

Home has to do with sacred space, yet to be created.
W. Paul Jones, A Table in the Desert: Making Space Holy, p. 4

This book showed up on my desk not too long ago, and I finally got around to picking it up.  In this book, Jones works to find the holy in places and spaces as diverse as Appalachian coal mines, the Grand Canyon, the Vietnam Memorial, the Incarnation and the Sacraments of Holy Communion.

I’ve spoken before about finding God in the mundane, or, as Katharine Jefferts Schori titled her most recent book, finding God in the middle of everything.  And while that is a good thing to do, what Jones is doing here is just a little different.  Instead of looking for God in the everyday, or in the mundane, or in the middle of everything, he is asking us to intentionally work to create holy spaces.  He is asking us to participate with God as co-creators.  Rather than looking for the holy after the fact, he is suggesting that what we create has holiness and sacredness as its foundation.

When we move into a new house, apartment, or office, one of the first things we do is to decorate and organize things how we want them.  We want to make the place feel homey.

But what if, instead of wanting to make our space feel homey, we worked to make it feel holy?  Is it possible to plan for holiness from the beginning?  This could be good practice on a small scale for a large scale redecoration.  After all, we do better when we start small and work our way up to bigger and more complicated things.  Babies don't run marathons at two.  Just because you learned to ride a bike at six, doesn't mean you get the keys to the car.  Every sports official of every game you watch on TV began his or her career calling games at the lowest level imaginable.  We can't make the space of the world holy and sacred without making our own houses holy and sacred first.

We might begin by giving thanks for every new day that we are able to breathe, move, and live in God's creation.  We can work to create a holy and sacred space in our homes.  We can view our relationships as being connected with sacred cords.  We can work to live into the sacred mystery of Holy Eucharist, rather than seeing it as something we do once a week.

Starting small just might lead us to find ways to create larger sacred spaces around us.  Which, if you think about it, is our ultimate goal.  Every Sunday, and sometimes more often, we recite the Lord's Prayer:  Our Father, who art in heaven . . . thy kingdom come . . . on earth as it is in heaven.  This heavenly kingdom is, ultimately, our home.  But this heavenly kingdom, this sacred space, on earth has yet to be created.  And in that we are co-creators with God.  We are tasked with helping to make that kingdom come.

The problem is, though, that transforming the world is a really big job.  So the solution seems to be for us to start small.  We begin at home.  We begin with what we know.  We begin there and expand out, creating ever larger sacred and holy spaces.  We are, in a sense, working to create our home.  Instead of looking at this creation as business-as-usual, or waiting for God to magically fix everything, let's revise the blueprint so that we are active co-creators with God and the first part of what we build is sacred.

Amen.