Staking a Claim

One difficulty with a theology of sacred space is the human tendency to try and “confine” God to one place or another, as if God has a GPS location. This can happen to us when we frequent a space, such as a church, that we call “sacred”.  We expect the sacred to be present when we call out, to be in places that others have told us about, or to be where we have known God to be in the past. The concept of a “Holy Land” or “Holy Place” can be dangerous when it becomes a way of staking a claim to God in a land that belongs only to “me and mine”.

Years ago I read a story written by Annie Dillard entitled “Living Like Weasels”. She talks about a walk one evening at sunset when she goes to a pond near her house. She is watching the lily pads and the carp in the water when a bird flies behind her. When she turns around to see the bird, she startles a weasel in the brush. She has never seen a weasel wild before. She is stunned into stillness and, so is the weasel. She and the animal share a moment, their eyes locked in intense engagement, and then the animal runs to the wild and vanishes. She waits, motionless, but the animal doesn’t return.

What a gift to lock eyes with such a free and unconfined creature! She cannot claim it; she can only revel in it. And so it is, it seems to me, to meet God.

We need wild places and creatures to remind us that God is not our possession. God is a wild thing, free and uncontained! This makes the promise of God ‘s claim on us such a welcome surprise instead of an expected entitlement.

Kari Reiquam