What’s a sacred space?

I KNOW a woman who describes her old wooden kitchen table as “sacred space”. It is here that friends gather over coffee to talk of deep things, to be comforted in times of crisis and to pray.

She said a sacred place was where you can “find yourself again and again”

I have a Christian friend who detests entering a church but can spend hours contemplating and talking with God on his “holy place” – a mountain overlooking a beach. It is here that he says he has deeply felt the transcendent.

Sacred places have exerted a mysterious attraction on billions of people around the world since ancient times.

Our human inclination may be to say that either everything is sacred or nothing is.
In this country where symbols of the profane far outnumber the sacred and churches have become merely physical structures, many people are more likely to list “sacred sites” as war memorials, some Aboriginal areas and maybe even the MCG.

An internet survey of what people consider sacred inspired answers including liberty, love, freedom, dogs, music, sex, beauty and football. One person’s sacredness is another’s commonplace.

For Indigenous Australians, all of the Earth as sacred. Some places are viewed as having special qualities but the land as a whole is the core of spirituality. The Aboriginals understand what writer Phillip Yancey calls the interconnectedness of all life

Human cultures have always sought the bridge between humanity and
something that lies outside the material world. We all grapple with understanding that the sacred permeates every experience and that portals to sacredness and many and varied.

Jesus, the greatest artist of them all, said the sacred was all around us.
According to the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was asked by the disciples: “When will the kingdom come?” Jesus said: “It will not come if you look for it. Nor can you say ‘it is here’ or ‘it is there’. For the kingdom of the Father is already spread out over the Earth. but people don’t see it.”