We are on this journey to name and embrace sanctuaries—places of grace. Along this journey, some of us have named our sanctuaries. Some of us have discovered a place that has been there all along. And some of us know how easy it is to forget or to allow the tide of life—busyness, obligations, misfortune, pain—to hide our sanctuary from us.
In these times we need to help others create the sanctuary they need and offer help when they feel they cannot create or find it on their own. Sanctuary is—after all the preaching is done—about liberation. And freedom. And grace.
Terry Hershey, from Sanctuary
I am bad at asking for help, though sometimes I find it easier to ask for help from complete strangers than I do from my dear ones. I’m (sort of) getting better at accepting it when it’s offered, but too often I still default to a very English politeness and pretend I’m fine or I resist someone else thinking they might know what I need. I suspect when I do ask for help from those who love me, I often ask for the wrong sort of help from the wrong person.
Yet the one area in which (more often) I have felt able to ask for help is in my spiritual life. Joan Chittister reminds me that ‘the pursuit of the spiritual life is not something that is a solitary project, even when we attempt to do it alone’. It takes others to assure me I belong to the ‘People of the Way’.
After my shame-filled years of wandering away from God, it was Richard Rohr’s teachings on the Enneagram which finally made me grasp a really basic fact: that I am utterly unable to see myself clearly (in other words, as God sees me) because in the end, I’m stuck in the middle, with only my own same blinkers and filters to see through. To use Joan Chittister’s phrase, I cannot but keep ‘rearranging the furniture of my soul’ in exactly the same patterns I’ve made before. Chittister says,’the constant reworking of the more-of-the-same of our lives only deepens the darkness within us’, unless I allow someone to give me a new place to stand to see those patterns; unless I allow some holy outsider to bring ‘a microscope to examine both the possibilities and the obstacles we’re facing in life but may not recognise’.
Could I offer that new place as a kind of portable sanctuary, perhaps a new twist on the type of ‘tent of meeting’ which the Israelites required whilst in exile?
Could I become such a holding place where others might ponder, treasure, and behold God?
Could my work form a space where God meets others in the everyday particulars of their lives, no matter which direction they might turn?
I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating
existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible. And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech and beyond concept.
Thomas Merton, from The Asian Journal
making & finding sanctuary/finding & making sanctuary. Canon 7D. f6.3. 1/50. ISO 100.
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