I’m thinking about sacred spaces today.
Not just a personal altar over in the corner, or a dedicated room of your house, or even some semi-permanent circle set up somewhere in your back forty. Most Pagans have had one or more of those. I’m talking about a public, right-out-where-people-can-see-it sacred space – and the pros and cons of it.
Read on . . .
I got to thinking about this because I stumbled across this today. A small sect of Cybeline Revivalists in Catskill, New York is battling for a tax exemption for the former inn that is now its religious home. After four years of struggle, the sect won a minor victory in February – a judge denied the town’s request to dismiss the sect’s lawsuit. He didn’t rule that they should have the tax exemption, mind you – just that they didn’t get a fair shake to prove they should.
The town will appeal. The fight goes on – and sadly not just in New York. The Fire Dance Church of Wicca in Milton, Florida lost a fight with the local zoning board over the right to have religious gatherings at a private residence in 2003. The non-denominational and Pagan-friendly campgrounds at Camp Gaea near Lawrence, Kansas and Gryphon’s Nest in Livingston Parish, Louisiana have had their own struggles with local authorities.
The reasons for the opposition are often innocuous – traffic concerns, noise complaints, the technicalities of zoning, etc – but sometimes, they’re more brazen. Witch School, the large online education community, eventually had to relocate to Salem, Mass. from its home in Rossville, Illinois after a six-year battle against local discrimination. Someone left a giant cross on the Pagan altar at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. And in Texas, Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn operated on such a stringent definition of “religion” for tax exemptions that she even denied a Unitarian Church in 2004 for not having “one system of belief”.
Unitarians, as in “the church John Adams belonged to”.
It is a natural right to build sacred spaces for ourselves, to share them with our fellows, friends and family. Unfortunately, that’s never been enough to guarantee it. Councils, zoning boards, law enforcement – they’ve been our friends, at times, but all too often some among them have made themselves obstacles for their own prejudices’ sake. And even when they don’t, the hostility of neighbors and passers-by and plain old busybodies can be a heavy weight to bear.
But still, it’s a seductive dream. Strong as your faith may be, and however stronger a spiritual community, there is something wonderful about a place – a dedicated garden, a ritual site, a temple. Its existence implies a certain level of establishment, however many protesters may come. There is just something about the ability to point to some physical confirmation that you’re part of the community around you.
You belong here.
Is it necessary? Does a Pagan need a building, or some public site? Is your or my spiritual life diminished if our rituals are quiet, private things? Maybe not – at least, not from the standpoint of personal spirituality.
But ultimately, I think it’s important, and worth the fight . . . Paganism is about connection, not isolation. Charity, education, fellowship . . . these things eventually require more than that private altar or that ritual room. In the end, only so many people can gather in your back yard at Midsummer.
To live privately is to live on the margins, to be unseen – and that means always being alien to the broader community, and always being limited in how much we can affect the world. The hospitals and charities and colleges and other great works of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc, all may be born in faiths no stronger or weaker than our own, but they grow upon the foundation of houses of worship, of holy sites, of places.
I used to dream about how wonderful it would be to have a large Pagan temple in Jacksonville . . . I imagined it as a building with a central atrium and five wings, laid out like a pentagram. It would be on the river, maybe where they ended up building that stack of unwanted condos. I even had a name for it: Arte Sapiens – "Craft of the Wise".
There is no Pagan temple on the St Johns River and – Jacksonville being Jacksonville – I don’t know if I’ll live to see the day there is. But I keep the dream, because the establishment of a place is part of the fight for acceptance – and acceptance, in the end, comes no other way. I keep the dream because, whatever obstacles and hostility may be on that path, that dream holds a promise too sweet to let go:
You belong here.