I stood in awe, inside the sacred space inside Notre Dame, after walking the circuit around the building and its impressive gothic architecture. While we tourists gawked, the faithful worshipped, as they did every day, as they did regardless of our other, more secular interests. The smoke rose from the Catholic censer, the light shone down through the majestic stained glass, and the place emanated divine presence simply because so many had called upon it for so long. Their God shimmered through the space because they called upon it; because they took solace in it; because they made it real.
I have a complicated relationship with Christianity and no desire to absolve it for its heinous crimes against those I consider to be my people; the heathens, the pagans, the natural healers, the Druids, the ones who worship the Old Ones. But calling in the sacred is something that should be beyond religious differences; beyond your cult or my mythic reality; beyond conflict.
Sacred flames for departed souls
When I was Director of Studies at the Phoenix Institute I decorated my glass office wall with these abstract images, all taken from a set of photos I took from within Notre Dame that day. I felt like I had accidentally made modern art out of sacred art, which had been captured out of focus. Maybe it was meant to be; maybe I was reframing coincidence for meaning. I don’t mind which – that is matter for everyone to interpret for themselves. (Those pictures are lost in time now, like the Notre Dame we remember is.) Regardless, at the time, it seems that while we were studying holistic counselling and creative arts therapies, we were all trying to tap into that inner light that gave us the insight to find guidance in healing – for ourselves and for others. That’s something I want to remember today, as we grieve for this loss of the sacred dimension in Paris.
The faithful – and the not-so-faithful, in my case – in the sacred hall
Although I cleave much more closely to the sacred in nature – to what some call ‘the church not made by hands’ – I recognise any space made sacred by the attempt to be in conversation with the creative face that is beyond the human, that is greater than anything we can conceive, that puts us back in touch with the divine spark behind all life and the very existence of the cosmos. I give thanks for this space and what it meant to anyone exposed to its magnificent Gothic beauty and the way it gave access tot he otherworld within and beyond this one. Amen, Om, Aum, Aho, Home: may all the scared words be spoken in reverence on this day of mourning for one of the great sacred spaces of the world.
It’s gloomy, compared to a sacred grove, but the effect is inarguable.
When you’re in there, with those strong feelings, of confusion and angst, thrown about by waves of emotion or distracted by random thoughts, plagued by doubts about your lack of an effective game plan for life or just plain down … it feels like chaos. Imagine yourself in one of the darker corners of this image, or being tossed by one of the waves as it crashes off a spiralling wing of energy, or crushed as one finger of force presses down upon your local environment or mind/body. Your experience is all-encompassing, complete, true to the life and death of this existence, right now …
But there’s always another side. There’s always another dimension, an aspect of the experience that forces you to evolve, or asks you to be patient, or simply washes over and leaves you feeling … OK. Refreshed perhaps, or even just relieved. At their best, such experiences inspire us to reaffirm our faith in the goodness of the universe. Very often, they leave us feeling that on the other side of chaos there exists an underlying order, a way that life unfolds that we could not possibly have imagined would turn out for the best. Or, at least, could leave us feeling enlightened, awakened, deeper or stronger or just … more fortunate.
When you come out the other side, what seemed like a chaotic jumble may turn out to look like a beautiful piece of art. Or an infuriating waste of time. It might seem like a period of testing, followed by an experience of thankfulness, which goes beyond rational comprehension. No matter how we interpret events, fractals remind us that the beauty of life and the world, the earth and the stars and the subatomic dimensions and all of life in its unfolding, is there at the end … because it is always there within: within each twist and turn of life, each crushing defeat or seemingly cruel turn of fate.
So if you find this post feeling anxious or confused, angry or ignorant, sad or lost, have faith. Some kind of order follows; some kind of pattern appears; something will always return to make you feel thankful for your life. Faith isn’t just for the religious – in fact, it’s another case where religions have stamped their authority over something that is innate, natural to each of us. It is an archetypal experience, to use a Jungian term, which arises spontaneously in anyone who survives something they can see the brighter side of afterwards.
Link up to a fractal doing just that and boom! There you are too.
