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Reading into the early hours of the morning and eventually feeling tired enough to sleep, a thought about so called sacred places flicked across the screen of my mind.
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Why now in a time of viral pandemic? And why sacred places?
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Now I am used to thinking of a sacred place as a church or temple or mosque or some other holy place especially put aside and reserved for religious purposes, and I have been in many hundreds of them over these last forty years or so.
But that is not what this particular thought was saying. It asked the question; are there places other than those put aside for a deity, that take on special significance for me; those that take me out of the everyday humdrum of life and catapult me into a place of inner calm?
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The calm that then makes way for and leads to a sense of the awe-filled recognition of the stupendous beauty of the cosmos we are but a speck of consciousness in.
A night spent camped out in the desert with no pollution or cloud cover to observe the view of the night sky is one example of that sort of place for me.
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A place that also still has special power for me is where, like a thirteenth century French troubadour I first caught ‘sight’ of the beautiful maiden I was destined to marry.
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Or the place where I first caught sight of my first born child.
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Not just place but time and person can seem to be special as well.
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Sacred in terms of set apart; apart where celebration of life seems to be an essential component.
One could go on and on but then along comes the BUG that grabs one’s attention.
We are told that we have to go to a special place to in effect wait to see if the grim reaper eventually calls. And that special place is our own home of what ever form it takes.
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Well, what a surprise. An extra special place!
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Now only a person who doesn’t value life fools around with death.
I mean real death, not the pseudo death that a ‘thrill seeker’ is looking for.
The death that is imminent.
The death that panics to the core.
The death that one loses total control to and terror accompanies.
And this special place we are sent to and possibly experience this, is our home; our own set apart place where we can retreat from the everyday world after a day’s toil.
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Now that’s an idea. One’s home as sacred place.
There are people I know who have a ‘special area set aside’ in their home where they can retreat to when ‘time out’ is needed, but extremely rare the person I have come across in my three score and ten so for, who has designed and built their home with this “sacred” idea as the core principle.
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Do you remember the time back in the 1960’s when the era of architectural fashion was called brutalism; the fashion that when followed by government employed architects to design for mass public housing produced such monstrosities that communal breakdown, mental illness and premature death was a constant danger? A worse example of a de-sacralised home I cannot think of at the moment but I am sure there are many more.
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After being in lock-down for a few weeks with this unexpected forced ‘time out’, how does one’s own home stack up in the sacred stakes? A beautiful retreat, where the soul is fed with beautiful food; or more prison like, where society sends its outcasts?
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This BUG is certainly turning out to be a prolific little teacher. I wonder if they will be teachings that stick? If not, I guess further future schooling will be necessary, with stricter measures being used.
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I do hope not as I am a bit averse to too much pain.