Sacred Places
Friday, November 14, 2025
There are no privileged locations. If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere. All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look.
—Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put
Spiritual writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder describes the almost universal experience of transcendence in the natural world:
One of my favorite questions to ask people is whether they experience the sacred in the living world. Everyone I have ever put this question to has, near-immediately, answered “yes,” even if they would not call themselves spiritual or ever employ the word sacred. The affirmative answer to that question is also always paired with a specific place or experience. I’ve heard countless stories of what I’ve come to think of as axis mundi experiences: encounters that have pulled someone into a deep experience of felt belonging upon the tiny bit of Earth that they find themselves upon. It’s often very simple: a passing deer or a bathing bird that somehow opens a window into their sensory being, and, from there, the relationship flows freely, not between I and it, but I and thou.
We encounter the sacred by paying attention to the life around us and the ground beneath our feet:
I define “sacred” as that which pulls us beyond the bounds of our individual selves, envelops us within mystery, and gives us a glimpse into the vast, entwined, eternal network of living beings that we are in relationship with. A simpler way of saying it: the moments when we are most fully human via our awareness that we are fully entangled, down to our nuclei and electrons, in the Earth and the cosmos…. The living world can illuminate this understanding in the forms of awe and wonder, as well as in the forms of grief and loss. And such illuminations can arise spontaneously into our consciousnesses, precisely because this sacred truth is always present everywhere upon the Earth, whether or not we are aware of it…. They are the moments when that sacred reality comes into focus, inviting us to orient ourselves, even if briefly, to the particular, small bit of the cosmos where we have placed our feet. Perhaps this has happened for you upon reaching the summit of a mountain, or while sitting beneath the boughs of an old growth tree, or simply while hearing the voice of a bird you recognize from your childhood home.
Which is to say: whatever we believe (or don’t) about God and gods, about holy texts and pilgrimages, all of us hold within ourselves the potential to be pinned in place by a sacred pole. And in this time when there is so much disconnect from the living world, so much separation, in this time of razed forests, deserted pockets of warmed oceans, and the echoes of extinct species, orienting ourselves around these fixed points becomes more crucial than ever.
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John Chaffee 5 on Friday
1.
“Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.”
– Brother Lawrence, Discalced Carmelite Monk
The older I get, the more and more I see the need for my own pursuit of God. The world has enough of its own issues that I should not bother to speak about them if I have not oriented myself in the right way.
Brother Lawrence, who taught us the “practice of the presence of God,” is a constant reminder to me that the spiritual life is often over-complicated. In reality, it is actually quite simple.
The spiritual life is a simple matter of caring about one thing —God —and letting everything else be a distant second.
2.
“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian Author
Dostoevsky shares with Nietzsche the ability to convey grand ideas in concise and pithy statements.
It is from Dostoevsky that I learned about the horror and destruction that can occur when we are dishonest with ourselves. For him, the first sin is when we begin to lie to ourselves about what is good for us. That is not the same thing as pride, and choosing the bad because we want to. It is different than that. Lying to ourselves is a matter of deception, of falsehood, of trickery.
As such, one of the most important things we can ever do for ourselves and those around us is to learn to speak the truth as often as possible.
3.
“Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.”
– Bob Dylan, American Songwriter
I am certain that there are people who have studied this phenomenon. Beauty is connected to pain.
For every poet, musician, painter, or author who produced a piece of art that resonated with others, there has often been a traumatic upbringing or life experience that compelled them to transform it into something beautiful (even if it was simply giving witness to it).
This does not mean that any of us should seek out pain to create good art, but it does mean that we should pause to appreciate the pain that gave birth to the beauty.
My wife and I enjoy going to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Fortunately, next to every piece of art is a small plaque that describes the year, the painter, and a brief paragraph explaining the context of the painter’s life. When you know that a piece was created just before or after a tragedy, it makes the piece even more profound.
4.
“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”
– Gregory of Nyssa, Early Church Theologian
In my Zoom calls with people, this principle that the mind cannot grasp all of God comes up with a surprising amount of regularity. It is fascinating how many churchgoing people were encouraged to use logic as a primary support for their faith rather than wonder.
Gregory of Nyssa’s insight here is spot on.
Wonder does more to nourish our souls than concepts ever could.
5.
“Everything holds together, everything,
From stars that pierce the dark like living sparks,
To secret seeds that open every spring,
From spanning galaxies to spinning quarks,
Everything holds together and coheres,
Unfolding from the center whence it came.
And now that hidden heart of things appears,
The first-born of creation takes a name.
And shall I see the one through whom I am?
Shall I behold the one for whom I’m made,
The light in light, the flame within the flame,
Eikon tou theou, image of my God?
He comes, a little child, to bless my sight,
That I might come to him for life and light.”
– Malcolm Guite, Anglican Priest and Poet
As I mentioned above, I had the chance to meet and talk with Malcolm Guite at a series of events last weekend.
At one point, he pulled out a book of his own poetry and read a particular sonnet, inspired by Colossians 1:15-20.
Needless to say, my eyes welled up with tears.
What a treat to hear a poet-priest like Malcolm read his own work.
Eikōn tou Theou = the visible expression of God’s invisible reality.
When applied to humans → we are meant to reflect God.
When applied to Jesus → He perfectly is what we are meant to be.
Christ has called pastors to care for his sheep. That’s what the word pastor means—a pastor is a shepherd. The metaphor certainly includes feeding, leading, and protecting the flock of Christ, but we often overlook the shepherd’s role in providing rest. “He makes me lie down in green pastures… He restores my soul,” David said of his Shepherd in Psalm 23. Looking back on my years as a pastor, I will confess that providing rest for God’s people never registered as part of my calling. Instead, I thought my job was to extract more labor from them. Often, I functioned more like a plowman, yoking and driving oxen to accomplish my work, rather than a shepherd creating space for God’s people to rest from theirs.