In Sacred Spaces

Art historian Dudley Young in his splendid ‘Origins of The Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War‘ (1997) claims that the sacred cannot be housed.

I took this rather literally: if you build a temple, write a holy book, fixate your ‘God’ materially, …you tend to lose the gate to the sacred.

Only with deep awe symbolizing in objects may help to come home in the sacred.

Gregory Bateson & (daughter) Mary Bateson in their Angels Fear: An Epistemology of the Sacred (1987) did a marvellous job in finding ‘non-fixating’ language to talk about the sacred.

First Nation Rituals are still exemplary for, and stay true to, this ancient human principle.

Lao Tze, the Buddha, Rumi, Hildegard von Bingen, Thoreau, Luther King, Luce Irigaray, Edith Turner all knew/know this: the sacred has to found and recreated again and again.

Try to get hold of it…. it’s gone..

If you do not eat humble pie frequently you never get there.