Sacred Architecture

Homes are re-creations of the world, we learned last Thursday night in our "Our Call to Sacred Places" class at the University of Minnesota.

After weeks of looking at slides of various sacred places and spaces from around the world, including ancient Greek and Roman temples (Pantheon pictured left), Gothic cathedrals, Buddhist temples, and majestic mountains and enormous canopied trees, we are left with the overwhelming sense of how important the vertical is to sacred space.

Temples and churches are filled with vertical and open space, drawing our attention to the heavens. The buttresses of Gothic structures mimic trees, as does Gaudi's cathedral in Barcelona (pictured right). They have columns that stretch from earth to heaven, representing both the upright human's spinal column and the path to the heavens.

Hindu and Buddhist temples and structures such as Japanese tea gardens don't point so much upward and they remind us that the divine is all around and within. They stress the sacred as imminent, rather than as transcendent.

In the last class we turned our focus from Chartres and the Pantheon to our homes.

The house, at least in temperate zones, is a vertical structure with a basement, street-level floor, perhaps an second floor, and an attic. It reflects an archetype of the sacred: the Tree of the World that so many cultures embrace, with the roots (underground/body), the trunk (center/mind), and the canopy (heaven/spirit).

Nancy and I have talked about how sacred our home feels. Each area has its individual personality, but they blend together to make a pleasing whole. Bill's bedroom, office, and bathroom are in the finished basement. My office and bedroom are on the first floor. Nancy's office and dressing area are in the finished attic. We each spend hours in our respective spaces, at our computers, on the phone, and reading. Perhaps the sense of space and the vertical explains why this is such a harmonious arrangement.

Even our fireplace provides a sense of the vertical. The chimney breaks through the roof reaching toward the sky and the trap door on the bottom of the hearth lets ashes fall down a chute to the collection box in the basement.

The old saying of "your body is your temple" may be true. However, we can also say our house is our temple, with the vertical connecting us to the earth and to the sky, to our bodies and to the Infinite.

Really, the whole world is our temple.

Becky