Scholar and papal biographer George Weigel wrote this about growing up in Baltimore, Md., in the late 1950s and early 1960s:
When someone asked us where we were from, we didn’t say South Baltimore or Towson or Catonsville. We’d say “I’m from Star of the Sea” (or St. Elizabeth’s or Immaculate Conception or St. Agnes, or, in my case, the New Cathedral). Baltimore was (and is) a city of neighborhoods, but in hindsight it seems instructive that we identified ourselves first by parish rather than geographical area.
For Weigel and his friends, faith and not just faith, but church, that sacred space around the corner, were central to their identity growing up. What an astounding thing. I understand that we live in a very different cultural moment, but Weigel's story got me thinking, thinking about space.
By space I don’t mean “the final frontier.” I mean the three-dimensional reality in which we live. Like fish that, they say, take no notice of the water, most of us take little notice of the spaces we inhabit, yet just as we give purpose and definition to those spaces, those spaces give purpose and definition to our lives. This includes our Christian lives as we set aside and experience - or fail to set aside and experience - sacred space.
Community Identity
For about 150 years from Pentecost, Christians had nothing. They were small bands from an assortment of ethnic and national groups who met in homes or in other borrowed space. Yet even before the martyrdom of St. Paul in the mid-60s, the Church was becoming increasingly organized (think of Paul’s instructions to Timothy and Titus about church leadership, governance and discipline).
By the beginning of the third century writes Robert Louis Wilken, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia, the church in Rome bought some real estate and began digging to build a catacomb. It wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t a hideout. The catacomb was an underground cemetery complete with chapels decorated with artwork depicting the Bible story. Its purpose was memory and worship.
Writing in an article titled “The Church as Culture,” Wilkin notes, “For the first time, Christians were beginning to create a ‘material culture,’ something that is tangible, occupies space, is public (though underground) and is distinctively Christian.”
The Roman Empire had monuments, temples, the Senate, triumphal arches, the Coliseum, statues and racetracks - spaces dedicated to the glory of the Empire, the Caesars and the Roman people. The Romans knew that such spaces unify a people. They create a community identity by developing a sense of continuity with the past and feeding the community’s collective memory.
That is the reason Washington, D.C., where I live, is mobbed with tourists 12 months out of the year. That’s why when my wife and I recently visited Boston, we walked the Freedom Trail. We’re Americans. These buildings and monuments, these civic spaces help define us.
Sacred Space
We see the same dynamic in the Bible. When Noah left the ark, he built an altar thereby creating a monument and sacred space on Mount Ararat. When Abraham arrived in the Promised Land, he camped between Bethel and Ai, and God spoke to him. So he built an altar, sacred space that commemorated the event and to which he returned. Near Hebron, he built an altar as well. On Mount Moriah intending to sacrifice Isaac, he built an altar.
When his wife, Sarah, died, Abraham bought a plot of ground in which to bury her and in which to be buried. Later, when Jacob was dying in Egypt, he instructed his family to bury him there as well. And Joseph gave orders that while he knew he would be interred in Egypt for a while (several hundred years as it turned out), his bones were to be taken to the Promised Land.
That Promised Land and Jerusalem with its Temple, in particular, loom large throughout the Old and New Testaments. And they still loom large today as Jews, Muslims and Christians claim an interest in that place we all call the Holy Land.
While I have not been to the Holy Land, I have been to Rome, and I was shocked by the effect. I found myself overwhelmed by the sacred spaces marked - as so many are - by the blood and bones of martyrs.
Even in Puritan New England, churches on every village green mark the center of town with sacred space. It testifies to the identity of a people.
Why do sacred spaces make such a difference? The witness of the Scripture and history - including the history of non-Christian peoples - indicates that attention to sacred space reflects the kind of creatures God has made us to be. We are three-dimensional, embodied creatures who live in a world of places. We define those places, and they, in turn, define us.
Holy Sanctuary
Years ago we attended a downtown church. When another large downtown church built a new campus in the suburbs, the question arose as to whether we would follow suit. The elders’ response was a decisive, “No!” We would remain in “The Heart of the City.” And that catch phrase suddenly appeared everywhere. Like the early Christians we were, in Robert Wilkin’s words, “fashioning a communal public identity that would endure over the generations.”
And while such sacred space serves as a tool for evangelism, the aim, as Wilken writes, is “not to communicate the gospel to an alien culture but to nurture the Church’s inner life.” The spaces our Christian communities inhabit help form a Christian culture among us.
Communicating the Gospel to the alien culture around us (and let’s be honest, the culture around us is increasingly alien to Christian faith) will surely follow if the church’s inner life is nurtured and a Christian culture pervades God’s people.
Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio tells of a friend who moved to a new community and was church shopping. One week his family went to a contemporary church, and his 12-year-old son left breathless with excitement. The rock band, the audiovisuals, the theater-style seating, a coffee shop with jelly donuts — how could church be any better? “Dad,” he said, “that’s the greatest church in the world. We have to go back!”
The next Sunday, worship was the polar opposite. They visited a traditional Anglican church. When they arrived, the church was quietly filling up. Worshippers slipped into pews silently to kneel in prayer. If words needed to be exchanged, they were in hushed tones. Before the service had even begun, the boy tugged on his dad’s sleeve and whispered with wide-eyed wonder, “Dad, I think God lives here.” There was a palpable sense of the sacred in a counter-cultural setting.
I am not suggesting that the Anglican church was sacred space and that the contemporary church was not. But I am suggesting that the Anglicans may have recognized sacred space in a way that most of us - myself included - don’t.
When we step into worship regardless of the architecture of our church, we enter the sanctuary. Sanctuary comes from the Latin word sanctus: holy. Holy means set apart, set apart for God. We enter sacred space. God lives here.
Do we know that? Are we prepared for that? Do we ever treat any space as sacred space? And if not, why not? If all space is “sacred,” then it turns out that no space is sacred since it’s all the same, all ordinary. We have to seek out those special sacred spots.
As I’ve begun my thinking about space, it has made a difference not so much in the way I think about the world, but in the way I see the world and God’s presence in the world. I’m convinced that Christians need a notion of space that is distinct from our secular neighbors. Sacred space is part of the foundation of an entirely new way of seeing, of a distinctly Christian culture that has the power to change the world.
Copyright 2011 James Tonkowich. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. The complete text of this article is available at Boundless.org.
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