Landscapes of the Sacred Part 2

Humans are seemingly made with with the need for a palpable reality of space. It is too much to ask for us to entertain ideologies and metaphysical thoughts all the day long. This is why what Rudolf Otto described as “mysterium tremendum” is associated with the particularity of place. In our culture today there is an estrangement from place. Men and women have largely lost a place to return to that they can experience this otherly experience. This is how many come to existential crisis and miss a place to dwell. Heidegger wrote that Place is the house of Being. The two cannot be separate. Getting to the very essence of nature, and further human nature, he described a person as “Dasein” or literally, “being there.” However, in this culture we have a persistence of the displaced mind. Belden Lane speculates that we have modernity and technological society to blame for this. We are separate from the three-dimensional realities of our world. His plea is for spirituality to be defined in such a way as not to exclude the palpable context of one’s lived experience in the holy.