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Union University Church | |
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| By Reverend Laurie DeMott |
August
23, 2009 |
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| In
Wyoming, there is a rock that is known by the American Indians as Bear's
Tipi or Bear Lodge. It is probably somewhat misleading to call it a rock
because, unlike the rocks cluttering up your garden, this rock is 600 feet
tall, but on the other hand, unlike a mountain or a hill, it is completely
bare. No trees cover its summit, no grass grows on its sides; its sheer
walls jut into the sky as if God accidently dropped a massive boulder while
on the way to create the Rockies. This huge rock formation figures in the
sacred narratives of over twenty Plains Indian Tribes. Long before the area
was settled by white Europeans, native people from across the western plains
traveled to Bear Lodge to perform sacred ceremonies, bury their dead, and
offer their prayers. The Lakota tribe, for example, traditionally met at
the rock each summer solstice to conduct the sacred Sun Dance, a ritual
of fasting and sacrifice that they believed healed any pain that had been
done to nature during the year and thus restored the balance of the universe.
Bear Lodge is for the Plains Tribes, then, what the Celtic people called a "thin place". The ancient Celts believed that there are two layers to reality, one that is accessible to the human senses and a spiritual reality that lies beyond our ordinary experience. But in certain places, they said, those two dimensions intersect -- "the boundary between the seen world and the unseen world becomes soft and porous and permeable... [and in these thin places], the veil momentarily lifts and we experience .... [sudden] spiritual clarity. Whether they called them thin places or sacred spaces or holy places, many ancient people had certain geographical locations that were recognized as a gateway between heaven and earth. The Plains Indians had Bear Lodge, the Celts had Glastonbury, and the Israelites had Mount Sinai. When Moses climbed the rocky paths of Mount Sinai to gaze upon the burning bush, a voice warned him, "Moses, you are standing on holy ground". The veil between human and divine lifted, and Moses could look upon the face of God. Many of us can think of times when we have felt suddenly and mystically close to God, but it is important that we make a distinction between thin moments and thin places. One is not better than the other and ancient people viewed both as important, but they are different. A "thin moment" can occur anywhere and at any time. It happens when something suddenly lifts you out of the ordinary into an intensely spiritual and vibrant experience, as if the curtain between this world and a spiritual world has been drawn back so that you hover on the edge between the two. Some of you may have had thin moments when you looked upon the face of a newborn baby or when you broke through to the summit on a mountain climb. One woman, when telling about a thin moment she had had, said, "Now everyone knows I tend to be an emotional person and so you might be inclined to discount my experience as just my emotions carrying me away, but I know what it feels like to be emotional and this is not that. It is something very different." In a thin moment, you are carried beyond emotion, beyond the limits of your physical senses until finally the normal boundaries you feel between your self and your physical world are erased. Eastern religions cultivate thin moments through the practice of meditation and neurologists have actually been able to map a change in brain functioning when a Buddhist monk achieves this out of body experience in meditation. As an aside, these same studies have led to an explosion of debate as to whether "thin moments" are all in our heads but I would argue that you can also map brain changes and chemical changes when people fall in love yet no one claims that therefore we must conclude that the one you love is all in your head and doesn't really exist! So too, ust because we can see the change in our brains when we have a spiritual encounter doesn't mean the encounter is not real. Anyway, regardless of the skeptics, thin moments have been part of the spiritual life at least as long as people have been writing down their spiritual experiences but thin moments are different from thin places in that thin moments are individual and what we might call "portable". You can have a thin moment anywhere at any time and it can be so intensely personal that a person standing right next to you might not even be aware of your experience. A thin place, on the other hand, is anchored to a specific part of the landscape and is part of the communal spiritual experience. It is a sacred place where the people can gather to be assured of the divine presense and there receive revelation, guidance, and comfort. And so for generations the tribes of the Plains Indians have gathered at a rock they call Bear Lodge to encounter the divine presense and likewise, for hundreds of years, if the Israelites needed to talk to God, they always knew where they could find God -- on the mountain where God appeared to Moses in a burning bush, on the mountain where God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments and made an everlasting covenant with them, mountain where Elijah heard the still small voice. Sinai was God's holy mountain and it was for the people of Israel a thin place, a gateway between heaven and earth. In a world that can feel too burdensome and too mundane, it is nice to know that there is a place you can go to be assured of encountering God. But there is a problem with thin places and that is that you do have to go to them, and the problem for the Israelites with Mount Sinai was that going to the mountain required at least a 40 day journey through some pretty rugged wilderness. Maybe that was OK when you were a prophet who didn't have much else to do anyway and who was used to eating rough fare like honey and locusts, but when you were a King whose calendar was quite full with building palaces and keeping your harem happy, and you were used to sleeping on soft beds and eating lots of royal beef, a 40 day journey into the wilderness to have a chat with God wasn't really convenient. King Solomon knew that it was important for the people to sense that his decisions had divine approval yet he couldn't really be traipsing off to Sinai everytime he needed to pray. His father David had tried to solve that problem by bringing the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem and assuring the people that God came with the ark, but Solomon knew that the ark, being really just a sort of big box, could be stolen or lost, which in fact it had been and would be, making it a pretty chancy sort of thing to rest your claim to divine favor on. So Solomon came up with a wonderful solution -- he decided to build his own thin place! He decided to build a house for God right in the middle of Jerusalem where he could drop in on God anytime he needed to and still be back in time for dinner. Now, it may sound like I'm making light of the Temple but my characterization of Solomon's Temple project as more politically motivated than religiously motivated was shared by many of the people of Solomon's time. Though David brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, he never actually claimed that it "contained" God. God might appear to sit on its mercy seat and dispense revelation to the priests but God's home remained at Sinai. Some of Israel's religious leaders, then, saw Solomon's Temple project as his attempt to remove God from the holy mountain and lock God into a dwelling of his own construction where God would be subservient to the King instead of the King being subject to God. And I suspect that given Solomon's record, his ego was sufficiently large enough to have made those suspicions accurate. But whatever the motivation, Solomon's Temple was the first act in a long history of western religion's removal of God from the landscape and the creation of our own humanly constructed thin places. Solomon began a revolution in religious thinking. While the sacred place of the Lakota Indians is a rock formation that has been in Wyoming long before Wyoming existed, long before any human brain even existed, think of the sacred places of modern day Christianity. They are all built by human hands -- the Cathedrals of Europe, the tombs of the saints, even the plain interiors of our local churches. While we might each have our personal sacred spaces out in nature where we go to pray to God, when we want to gather as a community to hear God's word for us, we go to a place that we have built for that purpose.
Solomon's Temple did eventually disappear in the ravages of war, and so King Herod, being the same sort of calculating King that Solomon was, rebuilt it and made it even more impressive than the first. But that Temple, too, was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD so that today only part of one western wall remains standing in Jerusalem. The lesson we might take away from that is that Solomon's revolutionary idea wasn't a very good one and we'd all be better off worshipping at mountains. But as much as the nature lover in me wants to decry Solomon's removal of God from the landscape, I have come to a very different conclusion about this revolutionary idea of his. I think that perhaps what Solomon realized, or at least inadvertantly stumbled upon in his political manueverings, was that "thin places" are not thin because of what they are or where they are but because of the community that brings their yearnings for God with them to that place. One person's yearning is not enough to create a permanent hole in the fabric that hangs between human and divine because as one person you remain alone in that experience. It is necessarily self absorbed because you are the only self having it. But a dozen people's yearnings, a thousand people's prayers, generations upon generations of people singing and dancing and worshipping, will pin back the curtain that lies between the human world and the spiritual realm so that those who come after can walk through as well. Bear Lodge, that sacred mountain for the Plains tribes, is known to most of you but you don't know it by that name and I doubt that you would go there to pray. We know it as Devil's Tower, a national monument in Wyoming, and though it is impressive or awe-inspiring, it is not a thin place for Christians because we are not part of the Indian communities who have gathered at its base for centuries, if not millenia. Thin places exist where the community exists because it is only within the community that we can be lifted out of our own narrow concerns and our limited experience to move beyond the single human heart into a greater love that encompasses all experience. Maybe human hands built this sanctuary but it becomes a thin place through
the faith of all of those people in this church who gather here week after
week to share together the spirit of Christ. Bricks and boards hold up
its walls but our collective prayers push back the veil so that week after
week God may enter in. |
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