Posted 27 November 2019
As I took my seat in the St Mary of the Cross MacKillop
Chapel at ACU for AOFE’s most recent Sparks of Beauty event, ‘Sacred Spaces’, I
can’t say that I was in a particularly contemplative or serene state of mind. After
a long day of chasing deadlines and jumping through administrative hoops, I was
exhausted and probably a little grumpy. I suspected that an evening focused on ‘the
sacred spaces we build around us and the ones we create within’ might simply leave
me feeling guilty about my ongoing failure to find time for contemplation and
stillness. But as I lifted my eyes to the vaulted ceiling of the chapel, allowing
them to adjust to the soft lighting after a day spent in the fluorescent glare
of my workplace, something began to shift in me. The serenity of the chapel—which
somehow manages to be both intimate and soaring—slowly began to work upon me,
and I found myself brought, unexpectedly, to that moment of sacred stillness
that I hadn’t even realised I’d been craving.
As Tiffany Davis gently led Fr Laurence Freeman, Director of
the World Community for Christian Meditation, and Cathy Jenkins, AOFE’s
outgoing Director, through an engaging and wide-ranging conversation on their
experiences of the sacred, I was repeatedly reminded of the mysterious and
gratuitous way in which the material world, in all its particularity, can point
beyond itself—the way that things, in the words of Jacques Maritain, can ‘give
more than they have’. These moments often come upon us unexpectedly. As Cathy
observed, we just need to be attentive and remain attuned to God’s
presence in the world. ‘When we see God through the eyes of blessing,’ she reminded
us, ‘he encourages us to see the sacredness in the day.’
Cathy recalled the way a simple childhood ritual like
lighting the candles in her mother’s special crystal candleholders invoked in
her a sense of wonder and reverence. Similarly, Fr Laurence remembered sitting,
as a five-year-old, in the chapel of his Sisters of Sion school in London ‘and
just feeling something awakened.’ Many years later, leading a retreat for
Mother Teresa’s nuns in Calcutta, he had a similar experience of peace and
connection. The space in which they were meeting was next to a railway station
and noisy, but he was nevertheless struck by a sense of ‘great silence’. The
room wasn’t grand, but it was ‘clean, simple, and there was an aesthetic touch
in the way the flowers were placed. So you know that someone looked at that
place with an artistic eye.’ This simple space spoke to him of the way that ‘clearing
out the clutter in our lives—clearing out the external clutter and the mental
clutter, which is the work of meditation—brings us back closer to the source.’
Sometimes, our experiences of the sacred occur in obviously
religious spaces. As a child, for instance, when sitting with her family and saying
the rosary in front of a large statue of Mary, Cathy was struck by the sense
that she was ‘part of something that was bigger than myself.’ But this kind of
experience can also occur in spaces that might, at first glance, seem entirely
secular. Cathy spoke of how a recent Van Gough exhibition was a ‘religious’
experience for many NGV visitors, and Fr Laurence spoke in similar terms about
the effect that the art of Mark Rothko has had on him.
And like art, architecture, rituals and sacred objects, the
natural world has a potent ability to connect us, even if just momentarily, to something
beyond our normal powers of comprehension. Cathy’s childhood habit of sitting
on the swing in her backyard at the end of the day and thinking about all that
had happened and about the beauty around her is mirrored today by the
experience of sitting on her veranda in Woodend and contemplating the glory of
the night sky—a ritual that is becoming, for her, another ‘sacred space’.
For Fr Laurence, a sacred space is something that we carry with
us as much as it is a physical reality. It is not constrained by the
limitations of the physical environment, so that even those places and parts of
our lives that might seem completely alien to a sense of the sacred are
momentarily transformed. ‘When I mediate with prisoners,’ Fr Laurence
explained, ‘you get the feeling that the Kingdom of God is manifesting so it
becomes sacred for that period of time.’ Far from an exercise in individual self-expression
or an occasion for self-absorption, this kind of ‘interior’ sacred space allows
us to move beyond ourselves. For Fr Laurence, connection is ultimately what makes
a place or a thing sacred: ‘When we enter silence together, we enter a deeper
relationship with each other and with God.’
And certainly, that evening, as Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’
resounded through the chapel during a musical interlude, I found myself
breathing deeply, perhaps for the first time that day, and what I felt was not
stressed or grumpy or tired; what I felt was connected—to all those gathered
there with me in that sacred space, and to God.