Rediscovering the Sacred Places

Rediscovering the Sacred Places

"Through the medium of revelation, forgotten sacred
places can re-manifest themselves."
    ___ Nigel Pennick, "Celtic Sacred Landscapes"

   What makes a place sacred? Is it some hallowed space? Is it the sitting of a shrine or temple? Is it the occupation by people who have honored the spirit of that place? Although there is no part of the earth that is not intrinsically sacred in its own right, our recognition of a place's sacredness tends to rest upon what other human beings have done at that spot, what they have erested by way of memorial, what holy actions and rites they have conducted to hallow it.
  Certain spots draw us to them, there is no doubt. Even if they harbor no ancient monument.  If there is no story associated with their borders, we feel somehow at peace or exalted when there. It must be through just that intangible process that our ancestors discovered their own sacred places - places of natural beauty whose potency drew them again and again to spiritual exploration. Some place act as natural thresholds, junctions between this world and the other where we feel in communion with the unseen world and its inhabitants.
  Some sacred places can be lost through neglect and forgetfulness, others are lost by a gross act of disacralization. But a place can be rediscovered and resacralized if we attend to the spirit of the place and learn what it is that makes that place sacred. The prospect of the resacralization of the earth is just a lofty idea for many people, but it is one that all of us can foster, in cooperation with the spirits of the earth itself.

"Call to mind a place - it need not be recognized by others as a sacred place - where you have felt empowered and uplifted. Dwell upon the qualities and gifts you associate with that site and how they make connection with your spiritual path. Take the first opportunity you can to verify your meditation by visiting this place in person. Sense again the spirit of the place."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

The quote at the beginning of the essay above reminded me that I have this book but haven't really read much of it lately.  So I pulled it off the shelf this morning to browse through it.  The Introduction is titled 'The Inner and the Outer Landscape.'

Pennick writes:  'If we look at the landscape through contemporary eyes, our views can be only partial; people in other times, or with other beliefs, have seen things quite differently.'  The lack of sacred landscapes here in my country, the US, comes I think from a lack of feeling ourselves as being separate from Nature, but truth is that humans are at one with nature.  We are part of it, not separate from it.  As human beings, we are rooted in the earth, but modern civilization obscures the fact to the point where many people appear to be unaware of it. Much current human behavior results from the denial of this reality. Tradition wisdom recognizes and celebrates our relationship with subtle qualities in the land. This is expressed in the relationship between each individual and the land. It manifests its spiritual nature in different places through different spiritual qualities. There is no feature of the landscape that is not associated in local tradition with some event or legend. If we open ourselves to this possibility, we can have a personal spiritual relationship with these qualities. In simple terms, these experiences can be described as our personal relationship with the goddess of the landscape, who is Mother Earth in her local form. Since the eighteenth century this has been described as the genius loci, the 'spirit of the place,' but it can be described better as the anima loci, the 'place-soul'.  It can be experienced by anyone anywhere, and it is essentially personal and ineffable. It can be likened to a rainbow: anyone who experiences it sees more or less the same thing, yet in another sense each 'sees' her or his own rainbow, for it is present in that form only within the particular observer.
    Modernism recognizes no real spiritual or even physical difference of note between places. Implicit in this view is the tenet that any differences that do exist can be overcome by the power of technology. The effect of this is the innate tendency of moderism to reduce the land to a random series of virtually uninhabitable 'nowheres', brought into being by the denial of place. The impersonal nature of industry means that the local earth as provider is no longer honored. Nobody knows precisely where anything comes from, or who made it, or how. It is delocalized and depersonalized, identified only by a trade name and perhaps the country from which it comes. Despite this, each thing does have an origin. It has its own personal history. It came into being, then was harvested, processed or made by someone, somehow, somewhere and transported to where it is now.
   So to discover our Sacred Places we must peel back layers of time and re-discovered that where we live is sacred too but has been covered over by neglect of reverence for the Land, our Land.