A lot of us love sacred places and go to them when we can. There's a certain 'feel' about them--whether they're cathedrals, forests, standing stones, mountains, canyons or quiet park benches. Sacred places 'give' us something. They 'add' something to our lives--which we find so very welcome amid the work and worry of lives that so often seem to be subtracting lots of somethings.
In this Wendell Berry poem (What We Need Is Here) we can perhaps sense, deeply, the inherent sacredness of Life--something always available, always possible, always potentially sustaining.
Geese
appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
It's come as a shock to discover I don't have to go anywhere to go to a sacred place. 'What we need is here.'
This doesn't mean I plan to stop taking retreats and making pilgrimages--heaven forbid! It just means that life, in a strange and wonderful way, can be just as rich in our ordinary 'here' as in any extraordinary 'there'.
By cultivating a habit of the Sacred Pause over time, we prove to ourselves this is so. When we stop our usual down-pat ways of 'doing' life and start making room for ROOM--open, patient, playful, curious, kind--we get reoriented over and over to what matters most to us. This begins to happen so consistently that we can't help but trust the process more and more and more.
Instead of being convinced that what we need is 'there' we move more and more into realizing what we need is 'here'--our here, not somebody else's.
Practice builds trust. Trust sustains practice--a gracious spiral into sacred space.
