In 1986, I visited Great Britain for the first time. With me was my wife, Luann, who had been to the country twice before. We were there primarily to attend a convention, but planned to make one significant foray into the southwest to visit Avebury, Stonehenge and Clouds Hill, T.E. Lawrence's cottage. We decided to rent a car, giving ourselves greater independence and mobility, while at the same time increasing our blood pressure.
I do not recommend learning to drive on the left side of the road in London. It's a harrowing experience. No one has the least patience as you struggle to overcome ingrained reflexes and interpret street signs and London A to Z at the same time. The only reason we survived was that Luann drove while I did the interpreting. Eventually we found ourselves trundling down smaller roads and quiet, narrow country lanes. Even there, we were a bit tense, as hedges, stone walls and even houses crowded right to the edge of the lanes, which seemed to be wide enough for a car and a half at best.
By the next day, we had adjusted, and set out to find the sights. Clouds Hill was charming (especially the Greek slogan over the door that translates approximately to "What, me worry?") but with few concessions to creature comforts as befits the retreat of the intellectual and rugged "Lawrence of Arabia." Avebury was impressive and striking, as befits perhaps the world's largest stone circle, in which an entire village has grown up over the years. But it was Stonehenge that excited feelings of awe and the sacred in me.
In late February, it is likely to be cold and damp anywhere in England; the day we arrived on the Salisbury Plain was no exception. The sky was quite gray, and the wind bit through our heavy coats. We parked the car and walked over the roadway on a little pedestrian overpass. A gravel path brought us within a few hundred feet of the circle of stones. As we had heard, there was a red velvet rope all around it, and an elderly gent in a uniform guarding it.
I was disappointed that we couldn't approach closer. I was also disappointed that the structure seemed so much less impressive than a mixture of photographs and imagination had rendered it. I was expecting it to loom over us and give off some sort of tangible energy. It just stood there, except for the stones that had fallen, and they just lay there.
Then the gent in the uniform gestured us closer. "Would you like a look around inside?" he asked, as he raised the velvet rope. Suddenly we had an adventure and a different perspective. We crouched a little as we walked under the rope, and went inside the circle of sarsen stones. We looked up in awe at the trilithons (two large flat stones topped with a third like a lintel). The guard took us around the circle, pointing out where the sun peeped through on summer and winter solstices, and permitted us to touch the Altar Stone.
I felt briefly transformed into another self. Suddenly the sun seemed to be beaming through the sarsen circle and focusing on the great bluestone before me. Not only the cold was cutting through me; some awareness of the size of the universe and the difficulty of constructing this monument pierced me as well.
Then the guard looked across the road. "Best you go back out now. There's a busload of children parking over there, and they mustn't see anyone in here." We thanked him heartily, then stopped in briefly at the interpretive center. Energetic school kids had already invaded, and we retreated to the car. I spent the rest of the drive back to London meditating on the stones, the countryside, the map before me, and the sporadic pleasures of British radio.
A few years later, and half a planet away, I took my first trip to Hawaii in the company of Sonja. On a mildly warm but overcast morning, we drove our rental car south from Hilo through remarkable fields of twisted, ragged black lava to the volcano called Kilauea. As she drove, Sonja told me stories of her previous trips and her connection to Pele. She felt she shared more than Pele's red hair: She was as quick to passion and anger as the terrifying goddess of the volcano. No one in Hawaii showed Pele disrespect, and only a tourist would drive at night over the roads that passed through the center of the Big Island.
We parked the car when we arrived in the vicinity and walked along the road to the great caldera. To our right the ground sloped away to the sea, with dashes of hot, red lava and whitish smoke decorating the lower reaches. Sharing the walk with us were dozens of tourists and a centipede or two.
As we came closer, the landscape became stranger and more desolate. Heaps of rocks were everywhere. Sonja explained that these were cairns built by other visitors in honor of Pele and in memory of their visits. I looked more closely and realized the stones weren't simply dumped in piles, but were carefully stacked so they would balance. Some cairns were only a few small flat rocks; others were tall marvels of impromptu engineering.
The caldera itself was enormous, probably a mile across and extremely deep. (Features that large are difficult to judge, and I don't recall finding out the actual distance.) Here and there, along the vertical sides spills of yellow sulfur decorated crags, steamy plumes obscured the view. The smell of brimstone tickled my nose, suggesting that the hole was one of the more impressive entrances to the underworld and the dwelling of one of the most easily offended deities. I felt dwarfed and awed, and knew I would have to add my own tiny monolith to those left by countless others. "A simple thing, but mine own," the quote goes. I balanced five or six flat rocks (which, you realize, were in abundant supply, as though Pele herself had provided for us), and Sonja built her own. It was a small, quiet gesture, but still a way of acknowledging both the sacredness of the place and the community of seekers who had approached before us or would come after us.
Thinking about these experiences led me back further in memory to my years in New York City. Next to the Museum of Modern Art, my favorite museum was the Cloisters. Set in Manhattan's prettiest and quietest park in the extreme northern tip of the island, the Cloisters is a late Medieval building that reputedly was bought in Europe by the Rockefellers and shipped, stone by stone, to New York and rebuilt. It houses a broad range of Medieval and Renaissance art and crafts, and is surrounded by an herbal garden that would make Brother Cadfael envious (to the detriment of his soul). I used to wander there for hours, looking at the Unicorn Tapestries and other treasures, as music filtered through the galleries, drifting in from the concerts in the courtyard.
But the one thing that captured my imagination and remains clearest in mind after more than twenty years is small, relatively speaking. Just as monks decorated manuscripts for the glory of God, and artists created murals and altarpieces, so did some monks or artists carve rosary beads to commemorate Christian sacred history and to teach this history to those that used the beads (probably some illiterate nobleman or noblewoman). In the Cloisters was one such bead.
It wasn't the size I would expect a rosary bead to be (though, not being a Christian, I admit I have only a hazy notion how big they should be). I recall it as being several inches across. It was carved from some dark, lustrous wood. The top half opened in two panels, and there, between the panels, was a hillside filled with people and tiny trees. In the center were three crosses with people on them: Jesus in-between two others. At the foot of the cross, crouched more folks. I was amazed at the detail, the precision of the work, the ease with which I could interpret the moment of the Crucifixion depicted.
Even though I did not in any way share the faith of the artist (I was raised Jewish and practiced, at the time, a firm atheism), I was moved deeply by the expression of that faith. Surely this carver's hand was guided by more than a lifetime of training and practice: some element of the sacred from within or without had taken part in the work, and making a sacred space in a minuscule dollop of wood.
I've now realized that I learned something about sacred spaces and places from each of the above. From Stonehenge I learned about the energy that's tapped when I'm admitted by a guardian into a space that's restricted and treated as too special for any but earnest seekers to enter. (I doubt that the guard saw me or Luann as such, but that's how it felt.) I also found out about the strong threshold between outside and inside of a sacred space. This is certainly why many traditions create temporary or permanent divisions between sacred and profane. When you're inside looking out, the outer ordinary beauty becomes focused into something both beautiful and powerful.
From Kilauea, I learned about the energy that's created by ritual gesture. It comes from a sense that you've engaged with divinity in a way that appears to be both intuitive and heavily tested by a chain of humanity back to prehistory. (For all I know, the creation of cairns could be an ancient custom or an entirely twentieth century practice.) Therefore you're honoring Pele, your predecessors and yourself all at once. Doing that kind of ritual creates a connection both individual and communal and helps to sanctify the place wherein it's done.
From the rosary bead in the Cloisters, I learned that size isn't everything. Stonehenge is a human artifact that dwarves humans. Kilauea is a natural phenomenon that dwarves Stonehenge. The bead is tiny enough to dwarf them both. When a person devotes all their gifts, all their skills to any God or Goddess they worship, that devotion can form a channel of sorts to funnel something divine and create sacred space of any size or no size; in any location or no location.
I believe that with these lessons and the attitudes they imply (contradictory though some of them may appear), we can each create sacred space for ourselves, for those who share our paths, even, if we think grandly enough, for the planet.
[Home Page | Other Articles in This Issue | FAQ | Local Resources]