I don’t have a church in my house.
Even so, I keep getting catalogs filled with shiny pictures of bamboo mats, mini gong chimes, all manner of fountains, crosses, stars, and even monklike robes.
It seems the accoutrements of spiritual spaces are now for sale. Not only are we able to have our own in-house movie theater, restaurant-style kitchen, and a garage better organized than some auto shops, we can now have our own in-house sanctuary. Buy enough stuff to fill it, and God will come.
The ads suggest you will find calmness, peace, meditative concentration and focus in your new God-room. Choose the spot, clear the clutter, get your credit card and begin adorning. The sacred will follow.
This is not happening at my house. Not now, not ever. If I made such a spot, my children would gleefully adopt it as their own and set floods of live earthworms afloat on my soothing tabletop water feature. I get goose-nubby just thinking what they would do with lit candles and unstructured contemplative time.
Purchasing a sacred spot is bunk. The sacred can’t be chosen from a catalog. The sacred finds us.
It is hot and late in the afternoon. I pick up my son from day camp. He has been cast as a hollyhock in a play – not his first choice, and “a flower!” he reminds me, near horrified.
His father will fix this later, will sit him down and help him think up a cactus or a Venus’ flytrap as a fitting alternative to a hollyhock, and his director will agree. But for now, I have no solutions, so I detour and park in front of the courthouse fountains, open the car door, pull off his shirt and say “go.” He knows me well and it is all the permission he needs.
I watch him run toward the water.
His body is no longer squat. He is far past toddling or even slight-footedness. He has stretched and solidified into almost gangly, into a child pushing in inches toward the refined presence of a mid-aged boy.
He looks almost too old for such freedom, but only to someone who knows nothing of boys, as he sprints over the lawn and into the jets of water rising like whale spouts, rising like puppet strings pulled, rising like summer and pure and simple solid joy. I feel the sacred settle around us.
Sacred can’t be designated. Sacred comes when God is present and God is always present – we just don’t tend to pay attention. Sacred is a quieting of your head and heart and breath. It is a calming down, sometimes momentary, a checking out of yourself, and out of the racing wild moments of adult detail- orientation. When you can drop the bustle and busy, you have neared God, who was beside you all along.
The fountains of water and a wet little boy at the courthouse can bring you awake and home to Him. Or walking the empty aisle full of books at the library, or the lift of air catching the leaves of a cottonwood at dusk, light barely there, moonrise coming, end of day. Or the sight of a blue heron flying low over a cornfield. Or the squeak of the turn-handle on a cherry pitter working a bowl full of fruit on the table. A red light stop with no radio on. Towels folded, dryer empty, and everyone asleep. Any morning before voices begin.
A sacred spot is where you are when you find it. It doesn’t have to be pretty or decorated or designated. It just has to work for you – pulling you closer to touch gently the things you are made of. God is always underfoot, or bumping at your elbow, or placing a hand on your shoulder nudging you to feel Him there, waiting for you to turn your head in wonder, for you to see the divine all around for a blink-long second as a boy runs through falling water.
