Reflections on Week One: Historical and Theological Groundwork

. . .What impresses me about this week’s reading is how time and space are used as grounding forces in Christian tradition and practice. As we see in Klein’s description of sacred architecture, places of worship and the surrounding space were designed to cultivate movement inward and closer to God (and here I am reminded of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle). Similarly, times of prayer carved into daily life, mirroring the sacred times and cycles of the year, are reminders of the beginning of things, helping us to engage the wisdom of those who have lived before.

For example, the Christian Pentecost, held on the same day as the Jewish Pentecost, commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit over the Apostles and the subsequent birth of the Christian church. On this day of celebration and remembrance, the spiritual birth of new Christians (baptism) is also celebrated.[1] Through connecting with and reincorporating traditions of the past into the present, we are more deeply rooted in this time and place. The tradition of Sunday worship is another example of this. While it reminds Christians of past events, it also celebrates their present experience of communion in Christ.[2]

With the support of these temporal and spatial structures, the realities most central to the church—manifestation, resurrection, and the indwelling spirit—are manifest.[3] Prayer cycles and sacred space help to extend prayer into all parts of the practitioner’s life. These practices remind me of how, in the practice of meditation, we pause in our day to focus on the breath. We are always breathing but in drawing our attention to the breath, we breathe more deeply. In pausing to sit on a cushion, we become more aware of ourselves in relation and attentive to the spaces in between. Likewise, the scheduled practice of prayer and the Christian use of space directly impact how we live our lives, helping us to be, most fully, human. Clement of Alexandria writes: “‘Holding festival, then, in our whole life, and persuaded that God is altogether on every side present, we cultivate our fields, praising; we sail the sea, hymning.’”[4]

As the rhythm of Christian prayer and the cycles of worship strengthen the connection between self and God, the sacred spaces of worship help to ground the human self in being. In other words, sacred spaces draw us inward and cultivate our sense of rootedness in the world. They also open our eyes to that which is greater than and beyond human comprehension. Thus reminding us of our partiality, sacred spaces encourage us to live responsibly in this particular time and place.[5] In his essay, Creatures of Place and Time: Reflections on Moving, Gilbert Meilaender reminds us: “to give ourselves to no one and no place in particular is not to be more like God; it is just to fail as a human being.”[6] The Christian use of temporal and spatial structures helps us, as human beings, to understand and to actualize our proper place in creation.

[1] The New Handbook of the Christian Year 21
[2] Bradshaw 77
[3] Handbook 24
[4] Bradshaw 73
[5] Here I draw upon the ideas of Wendell Berry: …No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality…” (The Unsettling of America 123).
[6] Meilaender, 18: Meilaender, Gilbert. 1997. “Creatures of Place and Time: Reflections on Moving.” First Things, April: 17-23.