Image: Unsplash/Pascal van de Vendel
When I was about 9 years old, I set out one morning on an adventure along the beach by my home on the West Coast. I loved nature and the outdoors. I walked about a mile or so along the beach, crossed a stream balancing on fallen logs, then clamoured up a large rock outcropping. But the forest at it’s top was beckoning to me. I wandered into its shepherding branches and was soon entranced by the stalwart beauty reaching to clearest skies. It was like I’d walked into a cathedral of wonder. There was a glimmer ahead through the branches and I followed it. Then the woods broke open into a little space where sunlight sparkled upon a grove of purest white little woodland Easter lilies. It was so breathtaking I knelt down to behold it. Joy filled my soul.
Then I thought how I would love to share this beauty and bring some of the Easter lilies home to my mother. So, I gathered a little bunch up and set off home. Down the rock outcropping, along the beach and over the stream and just a little further to home. I was running now because I was so excited. I burst into the kitchen with my joyful bouquet. But my mother’s reaction wasn’t what I expected. She was very upset with my gift because these Easter lilies were protected by law. And further I was a Junior Naturalist so I should have known better than to pick them. She was right. The Easter lilies I picked wouldn’t bloom for another 7 years. I was deeply saddened.
But I argued, there were so many of them. It wouldn’t matter, but my mother was firm. She would not take the Easter lilies from me. Instead, she ordered me to return them to their woodland home. Plus, she said, I was trespassing. But I didn’t think that counted though because there wasn’t a fence!
So down to the beach along the shore and over the stream I reluctantly trudged. Up the big rock outcropping I clamoured and puffed and then into the woods. As I knelt by the little woodland grove with my wilting Easter lilies, I realized somehow, in my child’s mind, that I had violated their sacred space. I remember crying and saying how sorry I was. The woodland with the sunlit grove was sacred space, a holy moment that I had been gifted with. I felt and knew in my heart the Easter lilies acknowledging my sorrow.
Image: Unsplash/Noah Buscher
There were many other years in the spring when I would return to that woodland grove, for it had become a sacred space for me. And I was gifted then with the realization that we do not need to take and have everything of beauty, peace, and sacredness else we lose it forever. We need to treasure it and protect it. The memory of that sacred space remains forever with me and has guided me.
Where might your sacred space be?
-Sister Linda Gregg, csj