"There Is No Sacred Place?"

 

 For Those who follow the Way of Christ

"There is no sacred place, everything and everyone is sacred"

 

Learning to See
Most religious searches begin with one massive misperception. People tend to start by making a very unfortunate, yet understandable, division between the sacred and the profane worlds. Early stage religion focuses on identifying sacred places, sacred time, and seemingly sacred actions that then leave the overwhelming majority of life unsacred. People are told to look for God in certain special places or in particular events, or in special people—usually they are the ones in control of a religion.   Perhaps this is related to the need for job security of to maintain control and a sense of power, which is only natural within most religions.  Early stage religion has limited the search for God to a very small field and thus it is largely ineffective—unless people keep seeing and knowing at larger levels.

Within true Christian mysticism, there is finally no distinction between sacred and profane. The whole universe and all events are sacred, serving as doorways to the divine for those who know how to see. In other words, everything that happens is potentially sacred if we allow it to be. Our job as humans is to make admiration of reality and adoration of God fully conscious and intentional. Then everything is a prayer and an act of adoration.  

As the French friar Eloi Leclerc (1921-2016) beautifully paraphrased Francis of Assisi , “If we knew how to adore, then nothing could truly disturb our peace. We would travel through the world with the tranquility of the great rivers. But only if we know how to adore.” [1]

For those who have learned how to see fully, everything—absolutely everything—is “spiritual.” This eventually and ironically leads to what the Lutheran mystic Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) called “religionless Christianity,” in other words taking religion out of Christianity. [2] Bonhoeffer saw that many people were moving beyond the scaffolding of religion to the underlying and deeper Christian experience itself. Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and that God can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything and everywhere becomes an occasion for good and an encounter with God.  God then sees the good and bad in everyone and decides to loves us because we were meant as was all of creation, for good.

God’s plan is so perfect that even sin, tragedy, and painful deaths are used to bring us to divine union, just as the cross was meant to reveal. God wisely makes the problem itself part of the solution. It is all a matter of learning how to see clearly now, fully, and therefore truthfully.

 Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM that which I Am Seeking,  

References:

[1] Eloi Leclerc, The Wisdom of the Poor One of Assisi, trans. Marie-Louise Johnson (Pasadena, CA: Hope Publishing House: 1992), 72.
[2] Letter from Bonhoeffer to Eberhard Bethge dated April 30, 1944. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 278-282.