"Being differentiated, sacred space also has a threshold, the boundary that marks our passage from the ordinary to the sacred.
In a Zen monastery, a practitioner stands at the entrance to the zendo (meditation hall) and offers a bow before entering the space. It’s a way to align the body, gather the mind, and say, 'I am here. I am aware, and I am preparing to do something different from what I did before. I am deliberately, wakefully turning toward what is whole because that’s the reality I want to create.'
Entering a sacred space reminds us: there is holiness here, and if we move too fast, talk too loud, we’ll miss it. We need space and time to look and listen and feel the real. Bustle and busyness are the enemies of hierophany [the manifestation of the sacred]. There is no better way to keep the experience of the sacred at bay than to rush from one task to the next. Instead, entering the sacred requires a drastic slowing down. That’s why sacred space is not only differentiated space; it’s also a change in time.
'The Sabbath . . . is a sanctuary which we build, a sanctuary in time,' said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish day of rest. If Christianity has its churches and cathedrals, Buddhism its stupas and temples, Islam its mosques and shrines, Judaism has Shabbat as a cathedral in time. It is a space, less physical than it is psychical — from the Greek psychikos for 'of the soul, spirit, or mind' — that allows for a deliberate turning toward the divine. For one day a week, time is sanctified because this consciously changes the way we perceive and therefore make use of it. Nestled between the lighting of the candles on Friday night and the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night, Shabbat is a space for the remembrance — or mindfulness, if we take the Buddha’s use of the term sati — of what is most important.
Within Buddhism, Zen is the school that most overtly highlights the importance of time, encouraging us to remember that it is passing and therefore precious. Paradoxically, it also points to the elasticity, and even infinity, of time. 'Ten thousand years in a single moment; a single moment contains ten thousand years' is a well-known saying from the Chinese koan collection The Blue Cliff Record that highlights the importance of presence in the experience of sacred time.
When we immerse ourselves in a moment and meet it in its suchness or wholeness — whether through prayer or meditation, or through more 'profane' activities like doing the laundry or having a cup of tea — all of time gets folded into a single point: now. There’s no longer a past or a future, or even a present to put a frame around. That’s precisely why having a cup of tea, mending a piece of clothing, or digging a ditch can be seen as sacred activities. In the all-encompassing reality of now, nothing else is more important than the activity we’re engaged in. In fact, nothing else exists at all."
- Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, from "The Places We Go to Be Here"
