Sacred Places
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, November 2, 1997
Most of the events of my sabbatical were carefully planned. I knew when I would be traveling, and to what locations. I knew when I was going to be in Nashua and how I would be dividing my time between Cambridge and Newton, Massachusetts during those times. I had my driving schedules, my plane schedules, and my "schedule-schedules" pretty well worked out. But for all of that planning and execution, the most vivid event, and the one that has probably had the most lasting impact during that five month period was one that was completely unplanned--as, it seems, most of our more vivid and life-defining moments are. And this one would have happened whether I'd been on sabbatical or not.
Many of you have heard me tell stories--either from here in the pulpit or during my conversations with the children--about the small farm in southern Ohio where I spent my childhood summers with my grandfather, and two uncles and an aunt, who were brothers and sister. For the past 30 years my aunt has lived there alone; the others had died. Nearly ten years ago, for reasons having to do with her increasingly reclusive ways and with the unknown workings of her mind, my elderly aunt let it be known that she no longer wanted any family members coming by for a visit. A neighbor up the road looked in on her every day or so. My mother, some 50 miles away got a call about once a month saying she was OK. She had enough Social Security money to pay someone to shop for her food and to keep the grass mowed and underbrush cleared. My aunt had steadfastly resolved that she would never leave the property for any kind of care facility. I'd send her a Christmas present each year and a birthday card, but never heard anything in return.
Then one day last April I got a call from my mother. The neighbor up the road had come by for her routine "look in" on my aunt and found her unconscious on the floor. When she couldn't revive her had called an ambulance. She'd had, as we later found out, a slight stroke but was also pretty dehydrated and very ill nourished from not being able to properly feed herself for several days. The hospital personnel quickly determined that she was no longer capable of caring for herself, and the local human service agency folk made the assessment that her house wasn't fit to live in anyway. Being the oldest child of her oldest brother made me her closest blood relative, which meant I had to get myself down there to tend to whatever arrangements had to be made. My sister, Rose, went with me and we drove straight through to my mother's home in southern West Virginia.
The arrangements turned out to be the easy part. With the help of a very kind social worker and an equally kind attorney--both of whom were women--my sister, mother and I were able to arrange for my aunt to go to a long-term care facility in that same little Ohio River town once her hospitalization was over. We worked out a guardianship with the lawyer, agreeing--in accordance with certain Medicaid rules--that her property would be sold once my aunt's personal funds had run out with the proceeds from the sale helping to cover her care expenses.
I'd been so caught up in preparing myself to deal with what I thought would be a lot of bureaucratic hassles that I was emotionally unprepared for the really hard part--which was a trip back to the place itself. The countryside where the house and property are located has somehow managed to escape the incursion of "development" (so called) and still looks the same as it did when I spent my summers there. Even though I hadn't been to the house in nearly a decade I knew right where a large cedar chest was that contained letters, pictures, and various other momentous that helped to tell our family story. Rose and I wanted to get them out of there while we could. A side door was open, but we looked in the windows before entering, and that was a real shock. While the grounds were well maintained, the house was a picture of squalor. My aunt had not been able to take any trash out for God knows how long, and we were looking at a smelly garbage pit. I picked up an ax that was leaning against the house before going in case I'd have to ward off any snakes or rodents. Fortunately I didn't.
To cut to the quick, we found most of what we wanted to save--including some of the books that I'd learn to read from--and then got out. I came our of the house with mixed feelings of guilt at not having paid closer attention to the situation there, even from some 700 miles away; and some anger at my now 86 year old aunt for shunning us in the way she had. But mostly I felt a deep kind of sadness.
Rose, my mother and I then walked around the property a bit. In contrast to the house it was very pleasant outside. Then my mother went up the road to let the neighbor know what all had transpired. At one point, with my mother paying her visit and Rose poking around somewhere else, I found myself sitting alone on some steps that went up to an old cistern well where we drew our drinking water, and from where I could take in the whole place at a glance. That was when the meaning of the whole episode hit me, I guess. Here was a place that was, and in a way still is, so much a part of who I am. It was where I'd run free, where I was shamelessly doted upon, where I'd learned to read and developed my love of books and of history thanks to one of my uncles. I even remembered sneaking my uncles' half-smoked cigarettes from ashtrays and taking them up in the woods and trying to smoke them myself. In those hot, dry summers its a wonder I didn't burn the woods down.
Sitting by that well, the next thing I knew I was having to keep wiping my eyes. Seeing such an important part of my past in such a terrible state was more of an unsettling experience than I was prepared for. I wasn't sobbing out loud or anything, but I realized I was mourning the passing of a very significant place for me--a place that at one time had had something of the flavor of the "Linden Lea" song the choir just sang for us. In trying to sort out just what all I was feeling there, the words "sacred" and "holy" kept coming to mind. I'd never thought of a relatively small piece of farm property alongside Mill Creek Road outside the little town of Gallipolis, Ohio as a sacred or holy place--but there it was. Even with the terribly deteriorated condition of the house, I couldn't get the terms out of my head.
Well, my mother came back. Rose dug up some flowers to take to Newton to plant in her yard there. We put what we'd taken from the house in the car and drove to my mother's home. Rose and I headed this way for our homes the following day. On our return trip I found myself getting into my "minister mode"--sabbatical or no sabbatical--by thinking, "There is a sermon in all this somewhere." And this is it.
We'll get back to Ohio a little later. For now let's ask: What is a "sacred" or a "holy" place; or do we religious liberals even believe in such things? One of the continuing issues I have with religious liberals, with Unitarian Universalizes in particular (and I'm obviously speaking as one of the family here), is that we are often too quick to give away the language of religion--language which can be very powerful and transformative. I'm aware that we UUs--both clergy and laypeople alike--are not of one mind on this issue for many understandable reasons. But my own view is that we disempower ourselves and our liberal religious movement when we fall into a line of reasoning that says that since our orthodox friends are using such terms as "holy" or "sacred" or "grace" or "salvation" or even "God", then we should eschew these terms because "we" are not like "them." Well, in a lot of ways we're not. But we are human beings, who ask many the same questions as do most all other human beings about life and death and why we're here, and what it means to be here. I view the language of religion as a tool--or set of tools--for dealing with such questions as these and use it as such.
So I do not regard a "holy place" as being a spot that has been "zapped", so to speak, with meaning or value by the act of a Supreme Being. Not necessairly at any rate. I can, if I'm in a certain frame of mind and spirit, get a sense of wonder and awe, and feel transported out of and beyond myself while standing in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral or--a little further uptown--the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, even though I am of neither of the faiths which these two magnificent structures represent. If I can get deep enough into a redwood forest--like California's Muir Woods--so that its just me and these incredible trees I feel like I'm in the presence of the sacred or the Divine, even though I can't precisely define "sacred" or "divine." Like the Supreme Court Justice who said, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it"; I have to say that "I can define the holy or the sacred or the Divine, but I know it when I feel and sense it."[I have to admit that's a rather unlikely analogy but I decided to go with it anyway.] But the sacredness or holiness of a place depends upon what it going on with me--as a human being encountering such a place--as much it does with any intrinsic qualities, however magnificent they may be, of the setting itself.
I got some help along these lines from a book by Dr. M. Scott Peck called In Search of Stones. Some 15 years ago, Peck--who is a psychiatrist by trade--wrote a book called The Road Less Traveled which caught the crest of a rising wave of interest in and searching for spirituality, and he's been turning them out ever since. [And no doubt reaping greater material rewards that even the most lucrative psychiatric practice would bring in] This is one of his more recent books, and, as the title suggests, its kind of a travelogue about Scott Peck and his wife, Lily, looking for rocks--very big rocks. More specifically its about a trip he and his wife took across Great Britain and, mostly, Wales to see the many and varied large stone formations erected by some of the earliest human inhabitants of that region, of which Stonehenge is but one of the more spectacular and intriguing examples. In the midst of describing the trials and triumphs of their travels, and of their speculations as to the whys and wherefores of the rock structures he and Lily tracked down, Dr. Peck works in a lot of spiritual meanderings as well. In a chapter entitled "Holiness" he describes a sacred or holy place as "a meeting place between heaven and earth...one between God and humanity."
Appreciating his language and doing a little translating of my own, I consider a holy place to be one where the mundane and the transcendent meet. It is a place where we are made especially aware of ourselves and of the truth that we are a part of something greater than ourselves, however we may name that "greater than ourselves" dimension to our existence. In this same chapter Peck writes, "The English root of the word holy is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for whole..In talking about holy places the key word I've used has been conjunction: a mysterious conjunction of natural beauty, past human construction, and a present beholder..I believe that human holiness also has something to do with (human) wholeness. Those people I would designate as holy have generally been more conscious than most."
Peck is saying that a holy place is a three-way intersection of natural beauty, of some previous human interaction with that place--or "past human construction" as he calls it--and a human beholder in the present who is interacting with the place. Peck's take on what make a holy place is certainly arguable, especially the part about past human construction, but its still worth a go. The Ohio family farm was just such an intersection as Peck describes. While not a place of spectacular, Grand Canyon, type of beauty it did have a very pleasant, pastoral ambience to it. It was a place where various human beings--certain members of my family--had given a lot of meaning to my life. And it was my returning--bittersweet as it was--and my human interacting with this place in the present that brought out its holiness, because it took me out of the present moment and for at least a few moments gave me a glimpse of my life as a whole. In this case "holy" begat "wholeness" just as Peck suggests. It is human experience interacting with certain parts of both our natural and human-made worlds that make for a sacred and holy places.
But the search for the holy and the journey toward greater wholeness contains much more than pleasant memories, or sentiment, or nostalgia. To stop with Scott Peck's "holy intersection" and my recounting of my coming to that intersection could give such an impression. The search for the holy and the journey toward wholeness also contain within them--more often than not--an encounter with brokenness of one kind or another. Our need for and questing after a sense of the sacred, and our capacity destructiveness and separation from one another as human beings can run very close to one another, and even collide at times.
We need look no further than the City of Jerusalem and the surrounding area of the Middle East to see this. Here is an area that is considered a holy land by three of the world's major religious traditions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. That makes up a good chunk of the world's population right there. Certain specific sites within this area are considered holy by each of those three religions. This is also an area where centuries upon centuries of fear and mistrust and hatred and violence between and amongst the people of these faiths simply refuses to die. The whys and wherefores, and the questions of who is responsible for what with respect to the tensions and tragedies of the Middle East is not where I'm going today. What I'm saying, by citing this example, is that the need for a sense of the sacred and a search for the holy is not an exercise in sentimentality. Seeking the holy and the concurrent search for greater levels of personal wholeness also means encountering some of the forces and powers--both within us and beyond us--that would deny us that wholeness.
This gets me back to what had become a shack in Ohio. It wasn't until much later in my life that I had to encounter some less than ennobling truths about my own holy place. It wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I came to learn that while I was having these idyllic summers, and having both my childhood spirit and developing mind wonderfully nurtured, there was more than a little family tension going on just below that idyllic surface about who knew best when it came to raising me. It had started with my father going off to war and marrying this young--very young--English girl while he was "over there." There was some suspicion on the part of my father's siblings as to how capable she (i.e. my mother) was of raising her own family, and how "worthy" she was of their older brother. Besides, why hadn't he married someone from "around here" who was more "one of us" anyway? It wasn't, as I say, until adulthood that I came to understand why my mother had such mixed feelings about a place that was so meaningful to me.
On an even much more sobering note, for my sister Rose the trip back was her first one in over 20 years, since my aunt--and the one uncle who was still alive at the time--had severed all ties with her once she chose to enter into an interracial marriage back in the early 1970s. She'd grown up with a lot of the same feelings for the place as I had, only to be, in effect, banished from it. How, then, can a place be "holy" or "sacred" when it was also serving as an overlay for a reservoir of unresolved family tension--and when it later came to reveal just what a terrible human sickness racism indeed is?
I answer my own question in this way: The journey towards greater human wholeness includes facing and walking through a certain amount of brokenness, both on the part of ourselves and in the world we encounter. I'm also suggesting, however ironic or paradoxical it may be, that a holy place can be one--can be one--that reveals the fallen side of humanity and the fallen side of our own humanness to us, even as it moves us to greater levels of wholeness as well. It is the combination of wholeness and brokenness that I have taken from a place which I've known for as long as my memory will reach, that gives it an ongoing sacred quality.
Over the many years and many decades that this building has sat on this site, I'm sure its come to be regarded as a sacred or holy place by many different people for many different reasons. And, no doubt, its seen its share of human struggle and difficulty and misunderstanding as well. Rev. Dick Gilbert has characterized Unitarian Universalism as a "come as you are" religion. People come with their own need for and searching for greater wholeness in their lives; we come with our broken parts and with our healed parts; we come with our love for our world and with our awareness of its many painful imperfections which we try to address in our usually small but meaningful ways; we come with our love and caring for one another--and with our occasional alienation from one another. Calling us a "come as you are religion" is pretty apt. And coming as we are is sufficient to make of this a holy place, where the journey towards wholeness is ever ongoing.
Copyright © 1997 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
