Sacred Places

I love to travel, but I always struggle with re-entry on the other side of the trip. Since we moved in June, this is even more of an issue now because coming “home” feels strange. Where even is home exactly?

Over the holiday weekend we went to the beach for the first time in quite awhile. Maybe it is insensible to drive seven hours there and back for a two-day stay, but I don’t regret it. We needed to get away, and something about seeing the ocean is life-giving and re-centering. Salty air, the rhythm of the waves, and miles of sand remind me of the hugeness of creation in contrast to my smallness and the smallness of my problems. Ever so often, I need that sort of check on my perspective.

I also appreciate how the ocean turns every sunset into a wonder.

Even though my dad has been gone for almost sixteen years, I can still feel his presence most vividly at his favorite place—the South Carolina coast. As we sorted through his things in the weeks after he passed away we discovered one of his last Google searches on his office computer: “medical practices… Hilton Head Island.” Dad once referred to Google as Goggle, and we never let him forget it. He may not have known how to pronounce the name of his search engine, but he knew where he wanted to land some day.

Wendell Berry writes, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

I’m not a mystic, but I think memory is powerful and the physical places we know and love matter. Every time I see and hear the ocean for the first time in awhile, I have to swallow hard to keep from tearing up. For me, and I’m assuming for my dad as well, the beach is a sacred place. Though we were very different in our personalities and our passions, I feel most like him there. And the older I get the more I like thinking about why that is.

There is an old store by the marina that sells gifts, jewelry, and little toys. We popped in on Saturday, and my 9-year-old convinced me that she needed to purchase a $5 mood ring. On the way back to our place she almost rode her bike completely off the path and into the woods when she noticed her ring color (and thus, her mood) had changed to “romantic.” Oh, to have an ounce of her zeal for the small things!

At my age I don’t need a ring to help me identify my mood. But sometimes I need to revisit a place and notice a feeling to help me better identify who I am and who I want to be.

Frederick Buechner says this about tears:

You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it… a horse cantering across the meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.

From Whistling in the Dark

I love that reminder to pay attention, not only to what makes our throat swell up—but also to the people and the sacred places that make us feel the most deeply. Because in a mysterious way, they are a part of us wherever we go.