In our last post, we explored the magical, powerful, safe feelings conjured by being “home.” That home feels somehow more real than what’s around it. That our family home fills us with nostalgia. That your home feels like the center of the world. We explored how, when you lose a sense of home and place, you feel emptiness and loss of meaning, a sense of roaming and chaos. Today, we talk about how these feelings of home are related to home, as a sacred space– perhaps, as the original, and perhaps, the last, truly sacred space.
A Spiritual Sense of Home: More than a Feeling
Bad ideas can lead us astray, de-spiritualize us. Bad ideas are all around us– the worst kind of air pollution. One such bad idea is that feelings are “just feelings” that have nothing to teach us, unlike their supposedly more noble cousins, thoughts.
As the rock band Boston says, more or less, “Sometimes, a feeling is more than a feeling. For instance, when I see Maryanne walk away, I sense the spiritual connection snap, and in that moment, grasp the fullness of the loss of Maryanne. In this way, at this moment perhaps as ever before, I see her in her full perfection, as a spiritual being connected to me by the powerful bond of love.” Well, they said it better than that.
Good ideas let life flow through us. We need ideas that help us flow, be spiritual, be vital. As Nietzsche once counseled us, beware of ideas that do not quicken and enliven us, and beware, ideas that despiritualize.
Joy and Spirituality
I know better, full of mestizaje as I am, than to think that the feeling of home is “just a feeling.” But our ancient Western forbears, such as Aristotle, understood that feelings are in fact ways of perceiving the world. The capacity to feel lies at the foundation, or root, or primitive ground of moral perception. One key feeling, central to our moral/spiritual world view, is joy. Joy is, sometimes, a special kind of emotional reward that we experience when we are perfectly functioning, in our highest state: fighting for justice; helping our neighbor; creating art all bring that special kind of joy.
It turns out, much to modern surprise, that the feeling of home is like that. A sense of home is a way of seeing the world, a perception of something, something divine. Let me introduce you to the idea of “heirophany.”
Spirituality, Joy, and Heirophany: When the Sacred Shows Up
The Divine entering the world is what the late, great comparative religion philosopher and scholar Mircea Eliade calls, “heirophany.” I asked Dr. Eliade– by reading, the way I ask a lot of questions– to explain heirophany.
“Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane,” says he. “To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany.”
Well, that’s kind of a big word for saying that the holy shows up.
“It is a fitting term, because it does not imply anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us.”
Ah– so it means that the holy, the sacred, shows up somewhere, or in something. Now right here, it’s important that you who are religious, or who are spiritual, or neither, each and all heed Pooh’s advice to Piglet. Do not blinch, except perhaps a little– this notion of heirophany is tradition-neutral. It is a fundamental phenomenon which underlies many spiritual traditions, certainly all of those I am familiar with. I wouldn’t want you to think I am stumping overtly, or even covertly, for a particular religious or spiritual tradition. I’ll let you know when I am doing that.
Heirophany is Not Rock Worship
Dr. Eliade reminds us that when the Divine shows up, to paraphrase Guy Ritchie, it is quite a thing.
“From the most elementary hierophany — e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone, or a tree to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act—the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world.”
Notice that the sacred is manifest in something. Racism/ethnocentrism alert! It’s a common misconception among modern critiques— so called— of traditional religions, that people used to worship rocks and trees. This is nonsense.
“The modern Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many manifestations of the sacred.” Boy, is that an understatement.
“He finds it difficult to accept the fact that, for many human beings, the sacred can be manifested in stones or trees, for example.”
Or in a tortilla, as with the face of Jesus, I would like to add. But, guys and gals, the tortilla is not itself Jesus, nor is the tree itself being worshipped, nor is the rock, itself God of any kind. [tortilla]
“…[W]hat is involved is not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of the tree in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree. They are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere.” (“Ganz andere,” let’s just say for now, means wholly, completely, and totally other worldly, in some strange, fantastic, magical and weird way.)
The stone, or tree, or the holy man, does not turn into something else. It stays as it is– but the holy is in it, shows up in it.
Sacred Manifestations in the Actual World
“By manifesting the sacred,” says Dr. Eliade, “any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone. Apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality.”
The idea of the holy or divine showing up on our plane is, I repeat, part of nearly all spiritual traditions, for all of human history. This is not to stump for some particular religious tradition. It is, a trying to dig out and stump for something more fundamental than any particular tradition.
Something on which any particular tradition must rest.
Home and Sacred Space
The Home of which we speak, that which we sense when we come home, is not just a heirophany, but a fundamental, a primitive one. It is, unlike heirophanies in stones or trees, nearly if not utterly universal.
Home as a heirophany is in fact so fundamental, that Eliade uses the idea of sacred space, to elaborate the very idea of what is sacred, what is holy, what is emotionally, spiritually meaningful. The two ideas in fact— of a sacred space, a special divine place, and of the Divine itself– arise together in human consciousness. Or, you could say: when these two ideas arise in consciousness, they make us human for the first time.
Home and Sacred Spaces as Order, against Chaos
The idea of sacred space gives our life, indeed our reality and our mind itself, a sense of place, of a center, where something meaningful can happen, a sacred center, giving the universe order, with up and a down, an inside and an outside, and outside of that, chaos.
Eliade thus writes: “For religious man, … there is, then, a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency, amorphous…. Nor is this all. “For religious man, this spatial nonhomogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred—the only real and really existing space— and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.”
This first and original experience of holy space “is a primordial experience,” akin to “the founding of the world.” It reveals to us a fixed point, a central axis for all future orientation. It also reals the part of the world that is the most real, absolutely real, which is sacred space. Thus this “manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world.” Without this sense of place, “nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation. “For any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the “center of the world.”
Losing A Sense of Home as Sacred Space
It is possible to lose this sense of sacred space. When we do, all space becomes “homogeneous and neutral.” What is a person were to become completely nonreligious? What if a person “rejects the sacrality of the world, who accepts only a profane existence, divested of all religious presuppositions?” What would follow? “No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.”
How Sacred Spaces Endure
Eliade, in my view, is too pessimistic about the degree to which spiritual concepts are still with us, linger on, and are recoverable. But he recognizes that all of us still have a sense that certain places are magical. “There are, for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others–a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality. They are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.”
Beautifully said, Mircea! Notice how emotions track the depth and power of the feeling of home. When something profound and powerful shows itself to our emotions, when we recall our childhood, when we fall in love, when we go on travels to places that change and develop who we are– at the same time, these places are made special and holy to us. They become, in different ways, parts of the special place called home. When you come into these places, churches with their stained glass, the well of St. Brigid, a secret cave– you get the strange feeling of coming home. To the very center of things.
Bring It All Home
I will conclude by bringing this all home, pun intended. Because the originary idea of sacred space is the primitive ground of human religious consciousness, it’s not surprising that it evokes strong feelings in us– since these feelings resonate to the core of our very being. We see our modest little house at the end of the street, or our cabin in the woods, or our dream palace on its mighty hill and feel, and sense, and know: this is the center of the world. This is a holy place. This is a powerful place. This makes me who I am. I am safe. All of these at once, is what home is.
I invite you to re-read what I said about the feelings that home evokes, in light my last suggestion. Home is, in fact, sacred space. Sacred space connects us to the Divine. The Divine lies at the very core of our human psychology– our natural spirituality or spiritual sense.
In your dark moments, you might think that sacred things are vanishing from the world. That nothing is sacred anymore. Now, you know what to do. Get thee quickly, to one of last, but accessible, most fundamental sacred spaces of all. Get thee home. It might just be your last, most sacred space of all.