Notes on Introduction:
Identifying the sacred character of a place requires participating (knowingly or unknowingly) in a whole history of cultural tensions and conflicting claims, even ecological shifts in the terrain itself (3,4). ... It seems that the sacred character is birthed from a history of profane elements. Lane calls this a web of interconnectedness that extends deep into the natural world.
I love how Lane states that he was "uncomfortable" with the too simple dichotomy between religion and culture. He sees that a place that is experienced historically in a non-sacred way may ultimately become a sacred place for someone. This comes from his belief that sacred places receive their sacral character from more than just cultural happenings.
He thus dives into the exploration of the individual while experiencing an external location. There is a phenomenon of the inside (that Yi-Fe Tuan's termed topophilia) where a person feels an attachment for particular places. (Other terms used to help describe this were geopiety and loca religiosa.) The common denominator within these terms is that their is a relationship recognized between person and place.
"Personal identity is fixed for us by the feel of our own bodies, the naming of the places we occupy, and the environmental objects that beset our landscape. But the effects of modernity, the impact of the technological society,and the various sea changes in our manner of travel and communication have all tended to separate us in the last century from the three-dimensional realities of our world. We feel out of touch, without a place (7). ... Simone Weil puts it in a shorter way, she says, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."
"The study of religious experience has frequently tended to dis-place the phenomena it has observed, abstracting the experience from its specific context and cataloging a whole theoretical spectrum of religious affections." ... This comes from a number of things including "a gnostic interest in 'spiritual techniques' and gifted gurus," (9).
"What does it mean to experience the holy within the context of a spatially fixed reality?" It must be a holistic approach.
Notes from Chapter 1: Axioms for the Study of Sacred Place:
Above all else, sacred place is "storied place," (15).
I start stalking God on these excursions... "Yet it is at this precise moment, where I give up looking for the burning bush, that my retreat usually begins," (16).
The Clearing In the Woods
"The uncanny thing was that I had been invited to the place, I had felt the deer (I felt some presence) in the clearing a good ten or fifteen minutes before she came," (18).
"The pastoral idyll has been a common form of the place-tale in the history of American myth. My own simple story fits this larger pattern-with its idealized flight to a redemptive wilderness, a renewed innocence never quite realized but always sought, a quest for the holy that is fulfilled finally in accepting the ordinary," (18). ... "The momentary, ambiguous encounter with that which is smaller than one dreams, yet larger than one expects."
Axioms of the sacred place...
- 1. sacred place is not chosen, it chooses.
- axis mundi (center of the world)
- a point in which a discontinuity affords entry into a numinal reality which both underlay and transcend the ordinary.
- is a construction of the imagination that affirms the independence of the holy.
- God chooses to reveal himself only where he wills.
- 2. sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary.
- loca sacra
- 3. sacred place can be tred upon without being entered.
- Its recognition is existentially (EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE), not ontologically discerned.
- The identification of sacred place is thus intimately related to states of consciousness.
- 4. the impulse of sacred place is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal.
AXIOM 1
The Mythic Power of Sacred Place
Not every place seems equally adept at communicating the fullness of being.
"For religious man, space is not homogenous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others," (20, Mircea Eliade). "The place is never 'chosen' by man. It is merely discovered by him; in other words, the sacred place in some way or another reveals itself to him," (21, Eliade).
--- side note that Lane addresses is that we aren't used to prescribing a intent or cognizance to inanimate locations in the environment. (JOB DID DOE)
The prophets, the apostles, and their successors the missionaries works to deconsecrate the world, dispelling its sacral aura... making it possible a new relationships to nature, essentially secular and open to technological manipulation. BUT... in the process it would destroy almost entirely any notion of the sacred place.
In much of Jewish and Christian theology the freedom of a transcendent God of history has regularly been contrasted with the false and earthbound deities of fertility and soil. God has been removed from the particularity of place, extracted from the natural environment. Hence, the tendency in western civilization has been toward the triumph of history over nature, time over space, male dominance over female dependence, and technical mastery of the land over a gentle reverence for life. In the artificial schema, God has often been viewed as a Lord of times but not places- involved in mighty acts but not so much in the quiet energies of creation. .... resulting in a rampant secularization of nature and activism of spirit in western life, leaving us exhausted in our mastery of the world stripped of magic and mystery (23).
"Is it possible to recover the power of the sacred space for those today who have forgotten hierophanies and all the signs of the sacred?"
Paul Ricoeur's conception of the hermeneutical circle by which one moves from an original naiveté, with its easy immediacy of belief, through a necessary process of criticism and demythologization to a "second-naivete" by which wonder is restored, chastened of its earlier confusion and credulity (23).
AXIOM 2
The Recognition of Ordinary Places as Holy
Its holiness resides not in certain inherent marks of external significance or obvious distinction. It is, instead, only declared to be different.
The heritage of the Romanticism since the late eighteenth century has conditioned us to expect the holy place to be marked by excessive beauty and grandeur... That's not the case though. At the same time we have a tendency to hyperbole and exaggerate a "holy" place, too.
AXIOM 3
The Paradox of Being Present to Place
Being fully open to the world, says Heidegger, is a matter of "dwelling" in a place so as to unite the four essential facets of true human existence- earth, sky, gods and men.
What do writers mean, for the matter, when they speak of a particular spirit of place or genius loci?
People can't change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported," - Wendell Berry
AXOIM 4
A Tension Between the Local and the Universal
The idea hinges on on yet another essential paradox that human existence is an ever-renewed tension between exile and home.
Walter Brueggemann claims that "land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith."
We feel uncomfortable being displaced. There is a feeling of void, even dread, that results from the deprivation of place.
We long to be placed in the land of the holy, but on gaining possession of the sanctuary we come quickly to presume upon its guaranteed mystery-only then to be driven from it in search of yet another place, another center of meaning.
Before 1730, the structure of American ecclesiastical space had been centripetal and hierarchical. Attention focused exclusively on the parish context, seating in the church was arranged to indicate social status, and services were held only in the proper place at the proper time. ...
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