Several weeks ago I had coffee with a close friend, someone I met during my teaching years as a young man fresh out of college.
Back in the day, we would have long, intense and profound conversations, oral and written—“kwentuhang buhay,” we called them.
These conversations happened at the time of handwritten letters, when one did not hide one’s thoughts and feelings, opinions, hopes and fears, joys and pains, dreams and despairs, behind the anonymity of social media alias.
At one point, she talked about marriage as a relationship that created and lived in sacred space.
She said it was from this sacred space that the two in the relationship emerged to love and serve others.
Her idea resonated with me: a sacred space from which one emerges to share with others greater love and greater service.
This Sunday’s Gospel focuses on the two greatest commandments in our Christian faith and the Jewish tradition: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
These commandments bring our attention to two core elements or values of Christian life: one, that life is about our relationships and two, relationships are about loving.
Loving service
In Ignatian tradition, loving is expressed through deeds of loving service.
These commandments and their implications to our daily living give greater import to sacred space.
How do we create more and more sacred spaces in our relationships and in our life?
Last week, I met with a member of our curriculum development team for our master of arts (MA) program in education for public school teachers.
The main learning outcome, and more important, the performance outcome of the MA program was building caring communities in our schools.
We discussed the difficulty of moving from “theory” and personal insight into action, and how to integrate these learnings in the day-to-day.
On a personal level, it is an experience of renewal as a caring teacher who will realize his/her mission of loving his/her students into excellence.
It is also a conversion experience, a turning back to one’s identity and meaning and mission as a person and as a teacher.
I sense that all our relationships are about sacred space. If life is about relationships and loving relationships—with God, the self and others—then all loving relationships create sacred space where we can be home with our true self. The truth of who we are is in our loving relationships.
From this we can leave home renewed to love and to serve others and God.
After that conversation with my friend, the thought of sacred space kept me in awe the rest of the day and almost a whole week after.
Two or three days later, I wrote a note to my friend to thank her for the wonderful conversation: “Two things struck me and have kept me in awe since Monday. Sacred space, what we were longing for and searching for all these years…
“Truth, the fidelity and constancy of the truth to us and vice versa; and sacred space will not accept—or has no room—for non-truths and half-truths… Everything is about sacred space in our relationships… Wow! Home! We’re home!”
It was a moment of remembering—remembering what is a longing in the human heart and soul that asks the question, in the same way the scribe in today’s Gospel asks: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
We must remember this moment when we seek what is the greatest. Often it is lost in the humdrum of day-to-day concerns. We lose sight of it or forget it as we confront and deal with the realities of life.
Our community is sacred space where we reconnect with our deepest truths and truth alone.
We go back home to this sacred space daily in our prayer; in acts of service, small or big, done with love; in simple silence when we stop to feel each other’s sacred presence; in privileged moments when we are blessed with special homecomings such as my coffee conversation with a close friend.
Sacred space provides the home we can go back to day in, day out, every moment we need to, to renew.
And in being renewed we become ready again to go out of the sacred space to love and serve God and others.
