Between Two Spaces Rev. Lissa Anne Gundlach April 7, 2013 All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City A Catholic woman enters a cathedral to pray. In the vestibule, she silently lights a candle before entering the sanctuary. A man follows her, taking off his hat before approaching the pews. The two worshipers make the sign of the cross before they begin their prayers. A Muslim woman approaches a mosque to pray. Her head is covered. Just outside, she removes her shoes. She completes the practice of wudu, or ritual cleansing, before entering. A Buddhist man approaches a Buddhist temple to meditate. He lights an incense stick as he approaches the temple. Before entering, he removes his shoes and washes his feet. Each religious person pauses at the threshold of their house of worship, to pause for a moment before entering. The worshipers internally prepare themselves to enter the sacred space with rituals and practices taught to them by their tradition. The threshold prepares them, body and mind, to enter into a deeper time of worship and contemplation as they leave the cares of the world behind. A threshold is a doorway, a place or point of entering or beginning. It can also be understood as a boundary or a border. In religious spaces, the threshold represents a transitional moment between two spaces, the outside world of secular concerns and the sacred space of the divine or transcendent. Traditionally, religions have portrayed the outside world as chaotic, unpredictable and replete with human suffering. The world inside the house of worship opened the religious imagination to something more serene, expansive and ultimate, with music, architecture and liturgy. The great historian of religion Mircea Eliade put it this way in his monumental text The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. 1
For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands. The threshold that separates the two spaces also transitions the worshiper between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible. We know that the earliest sacred spaces were believed to create a link between heaven and earth, on ground where these moments of connection to the divine were experienced. In ancient Rome, temples were said to be meeting places where the Gods descended to live and communicate with humanity. Contemporary sacred architecture still attempts to create the possibility for such an experience. The threshold, or doorway, of such spaces, is an invitation to connect with the sacred and leave the rest of the world behind, if only for a moment. The threshold is a space between, and yet it is a powerful space in itself a paradoxical place, as Eliade put it where two worlds communicate where the sacred breaks through into the human world. You might remember one such moment from Exodus in the Hebrew bible. At Mt. Horeb, the mountain of God, Moses is astonished to see the Angel of the Lord appearing in the form of a bush, on fire but not consumed by the flames. The voice of God calls out to Moses from within the bush Take off your sandals you are standing on Holy Ground. Moses purpose as a great leader is then revealed to him. We often hear this called a mountain top experience. Places within the natural world on the mountaintop, at the riverbank, in caves and under trees are where such encounters with the sacred take place in many religious stories and myths. For centuries, Celtic spirituality has used the term Thin places to describe locations where such threshold encounters with the divine often occur. The saying is that there is only three feet between Heaven and Earth, and in thin places, the distance is even shorter. Pastor and poet Sharlande Sledge writes: 2
Thin places, the Celts call this space, Both seen and unseen, Where the door between the world And the next is cracked open for a moment And the light is not all on the other side. Thin places are found in the wild and dramatic geography of Britain, like the Island of Iona in Scotland, or in ancient pre Christian monuments like Stonehenge. But thin places need not be constrained to the natural or even typically religious landscape. Eric Weiner is a journalist whose most recent book, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine chronicles his ongoing search for encounters with the divine, which he calls the Infinite Whatever. His seeking has taken him on a global exploration of different religious and spiritual traditions, including his own Jewish tradition. About a year ago, he wrote a New York Times article entitled Where Heaven and Earth Collide, where he shared his own experience of thin places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. Weiner names several noteworthy holy sites on his list: St. Peter s Basilica in Vatican City, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and the Bangla Sahhib gurdwara, a Sikh Temple in New Dehli. He also has some eclectic choices a tiny bar in Tokyo, Powell s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, and, surprisingly, the Hong Kong airport. While it is often the awe inspiring aesthetics of a place that define its power, Weiner comments that some of the most elaborate holy sites can feel heavy and meaningless, and some of the most remarkably moving places can also be as commonplace as the everyday landscape. Celtic spirituality writer Esther de Waal, author of To Pause on the Threshold, Reflections on Living on the Border, writes: When I visited Japan I experienced the role of the threshold in a very simple daily experience. Before entering the house, the Japanese stand on the lintel in order to remove the shoes worn outside in the street. Upon entering the house, they put on slippers placed inside the door. This forces a very deliberate and 3
conscious way of standing still, even if for only for a moment, in order to show respect for the difference between two spaces, the outer and the inner; the preparation for the encounter with another person, another household. I wonder what you might name a threshold, or thin place experience. Did this happen somewhere out in the wilds of nature, or some place as ordinary as the subway? Are you, like Eric Weiner, a seeker of such experiences with the sacred, however you so name or describe it? I wonder if you have threshold experiences here at All Souls? I know I have. Each Sunday morning, I spend time in the vestibule before the service, and walk through the aisles of the sanctuary preparing for your arrival. I imagine the hopes and longings you bring into this space. What you re wrestling with and celebrating. Before we lead worship, at 9 am our ministry team meets to prepare ourselves to lead and collaborate with you in religious community. These are holy moments of preparation that manifest in our joyful presence when we meet, worship and fellowship together as a congregation. How do you prepare yourself and your family for church? What do you leave behind at the threshold, and what do you bring with you? In Unitarian Universalism, we are invited to embrace everything we know about the world, from our own life experience, and science and literature and psychology, and bring that knowledge to bear on our understanding of the sacred. At All Souls, we create a place for the secular and the sacred to meet, a thin place for our lives to be made holy in the presence of one another. A Unitarian Universalist minister Norman V. Naylor reminds us of this with words widely used in worship: Do not leave your cares at the door. Do not leave there your pain, your sorrow or your joys. Bring them with you into this place of acceptance and forgiveness. Place them on the common altar of life and offer them to the possibility of your worship. 4
Come, then, offer yourself to potential transformation by the creative process that flows through you and all life. In worship, we open ourselves to participate in the fullness of the human experience, including our connection to something larger. When you are invited to prepare your hearts to hear the call to worship, you are invited to bring your best and fullest self into this space. Bring your emotions. Bring your bodies, your minds as well as your hearts. Prepare your hearts gives us permission to meet the sacred with our fullest selves, each in our own way. Some of us meet the sacred in music, some of us in prayer, some of us in the light filled architecture of the sanctuary. Some of us meet the sacred in ritual. Recently, an usher described the experience of transcendence she feels when walking down the center aisle with our collection plates as the congregation sings We bring ourselves as gifts to thee. Most, if not all of us, meet the sacred through our relationships here at All Souls, on Sunday mornings and beyond. Our covenant to one another through our Unitarian Universalist principles grounds us in respect and compassion for our fellow members and friends. In our small group ministry, we encounter another person s humanity through compassionate presence, preparing us to return to our loved ones, neighbors and perhaps most importantly strangers. Our religious education brings generations together to learn and grow in spiritual formation. In our congregational groups, our common interests and affinities combine with fellowship and learning opportunities that encourage us to be our best selves. In our social outreach, we find the sacred in serving others. To close, I want to share the final paragraph of Eric Weiner s article: Ultimately, an inherent contradiction trips up any spiritual walkabout: The divine supposedly transcends time and space, yet we seek it in very specific places and at very specific times. If God (however defined) is everywhere and everywhen, as the Australian aboriginals put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn t the whole world thin? Maybe it is but we re too thick 5
to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked. On our spiritual walkabout, All Souls is a threshold that can prepare and enable us to witness the sacred manifest in this world, in ourselves, and in each other. We are sometimes too thick to recognize it. Here we sharpen our senses in a community of seekers, in the words of Kenneth Patton opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits. On the threshold, we see the heaven before us the possibilities of beloved community and a healed world. Unmasked, let us love this earth, naming our lives as holy and good as we seek the truth together in love. 6