After a string of four-hour sleep(less) nights, I was anxious, list-making, nit-picking, grabbing at every twig as I was swept down a river of exhaustion. I made my own whirlpools of ineffectuality and spun in them.
I sat down at my desk and typed, "writing feels like church." Then I wondered what I meant by that. All I knew was that it was what I needed.
What makes something feel like church?
The first time I visited our meditation center, it was indistinguishable from the group of little white houses that had been built for the workers at the nearby textile mill. Part of the house had been turned into a shrine room where the meditators sat. When I stepped into that room, I sensed a difference. By simply practicing over the years, people had created a sacred space. I could feel it.
Church is a sense of refuge. My writing isn't a literal place, but the habit of writing feels very much like gathering with others to meditate every week in a sacred shrine room.
In our sangha, we acknowledge the connection to our teachers all the way back to the Buddha, and the connection to the community we are now. Maybe when I write, I'm feeling a connection to the writers before me and around me.
Some spots are keyholes through which we might glimpse the sacred. They can be naturally occurring.
Primatologist Barbara Smuts studied the behavior of baboons in Kenya and Tanzania:
One incident... seemed to capture a kind of experience and sensibility which is not only impossible to classify scientifically in animals, but which mirrors the unclassifiable experiences of humans ourselves. We call it spirituality. Late one evening the baboons were making their way to a sleeping place, down a small stream they often traveled along, which was interspersed with many small pools. Without any obvious signal, each of the baboons sat down on a smooth stone surrounding one of the pools, and for half an hour (by human reckoning) they sat alone or in small clusters, completely quiet, staring into the waters. Even the normally boisterous juveniles slipped into quiet contemplation. Then, again at no perceptible sign, they stood up and resumed their journey in quiet procession.1
Some places, like the stone circles throughout the British Isles, were made by human beings.
Sacred spaces are all over. When we were in Italy, we meditated in the local cathedrals.
Practices serve as keyholes. In meditation, glimpses of luminous wisdom are also compared to chinks of light that appear through the ceiling of a dark room.
We peer through the keyhole to see a glimmer of light.
Wonderful.