Searching Sacred Spaces

What do you consider sacred? What does it mean to set some places and objects apart as holy? These are just a few of the questions that we have been exploring over the course of our two weeks in Southern India. Each day as we walk down the street we walk past Hindu temples filled with devoted worshipers, fragrant incense, and colorful statues. But next to these Hindu temples, just a few doors down, we also walk past Christian congregations and Muslim mosques, also filled with devoted followers. Southern India is a land full of spaces set aside as sacred, be those Christian, Muslim, or Hindu.

We have been intrigued by the Orthodox Christian Church's understanding of the sacred. Father Abraham, a doctoral student at the Syrian Orthodox Seminary in Kottayam, explained to us that sacraments are not simply limited to a few actions that one encounters in the church. Instead he contended, there is an aspect of the sacred in every facet of our lives: our careers, family life, education. That being acknowledged though, through our exploration of Orthodox churches and the two Orthodox seminaries, it still appears that certain spaces and objects are set apart, as, dare we say, more sacred. In their worship spaces the "holy of holies" is hidden behind a protective curtain. Also, the Orthodox seminary was constructed in such a way, that from its original entrance, one would be immediately drawn towards the church's altar in the distance, by an unobstructed line of crosses. Father Abraham explained that this was essential so that visiting bishops would see the sacred altar and thus could say their prayers immediately upon their arrival. To adapt a phrase from George Orwell's Animal Farm, "All things are holy, but some things are more holy than others."

We acknowledge though that the tension of seeing the sacred in all, yet setting certain places and things aside as holy, is not limited solely to the Orthodox Church in India.

How do we as people working in many facets of the Church properly live in this tension? While there is no simple answer to this question, it remains something we hope to explore over the course of our life journeys. Noting that experiences like the ones we are having in India only further broaden our cultural and theological lenses.

Katie <>< and Jack