What Makes a Place Spiritual?

But, my experiences this summer provided me with a different look, a new way of seeing these spaces, and therefore a new experience. As Proust wrote, “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes”. My wife and I made a journey a few weeks ago to the land where my forefathers first settled in the New World and lived for a few generations. Gone were the mills where they plied their craft. Gone, too, were the modest houses where they lived and raised their families. Gone were the schools. So we visited many old churches, cathedrals and sacred grounds along the rivers. What I came to realize was that these were not just monuments to a higher being or worship spaces. They were the only structures and spaces that with any certainty I could identify where my ancestors had walked, lived and breathed. And, undoubtedly, where they prayed. And in those moments silently expressed their fears, their aspirations, their beliefs, their confessions, their invocations, their private thoughts, their hopes, their dreams, their solemn promises, their passions and their gratitude. I sat and knelt in the same buildings as they did, 220 years later. I imagined that I was in the same pews; that their hands had rested on the same wood that I was now caressing. I was connected to them in some way other than by name or a box on an ancestry chart, and I could feel it, or at least imagined that I could. In this way, these spaces became for me a spiritual place of a different sort – not just accessing the spirit or grace of higher beings, but containing the spiritual energy of human beings from long ago related to me, as if such energy were even capable of being contained. Later in that trip while we were in New England, I stepped into a rather plain Georgian chapel with its colonial interior paneling painted off-white, its distinctive pews and its etched glass windows. I had been there many times 40 some years ago, sitting in what I knew to be the same space. It was at a time in my life when I was trying to figure out a few things with all the thoughts and dreams that ambitious, young men have. So much was considered by me in this space. I reflected how I had allowed this sacred space to extract from me in silence my deepest thoughts. It was this experience that cemented my thoughts about those buildings that my ancestors worshipped in, imagining all that they must have been thinking. And then, snap! During that trip, I also learned that the beautiful, field-stone church built in 1950 in the borough where I grew up was being razed to make way for a Wawa convenience store and gas station. This was my church for the first twenty years or so of my life. The news saddened me, surprisingly so. Perhaps, more so, because of my summer enlightenment - that institutions such as these provide connections on a spiritual level with those from the past, and that now a significant part of my past was about to be lost. I came away from these incongruous experiences with renewed appreciation and respect for the visionaries, architects, craftspeople and artists who built churches for the ages – buildings and institutions that would endure. I am grateful and blessed to still have those buildings where the spirits of my ancestors pulsed and, at least for a moment this summer, resonated within me.