The Wonder of Sacred Places

notes on syncretism and the desecrating way of missionizing

 Takayama, Japan

I once thought the sacred existed only indoors or enclosed, like the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Bible—an altar within a space only a priest could access. Or the church building we attended on Sundays. 

The sacred was where God dwelled and so we contained God.

But as Wendell Berry says, all places are sacred that haven’t been violently disrespected. “There are no unsacred places,” he writes. “There are only sacred places and desecrated places.” 

We were skeptical of the outdoors, of park signs that boasted million-year-old rock layers, of “tree huggers” and “new agers” who connected nature with religion. And so God’s house became a modern building with Powerpoint and power cords. God’s house served off-brand grape juice and stale wafers. God’s house sent missionaries out to tell the rest of the world what to believe.

Missionizing ideology prompted worldwide desecration: of ritual and celebration, practices and worship, communities and families, diversity and variation—human lives. 

God was contained within particular buildings and narrow theologies, as if the entire world could only access God, meet God, commune with God when their own sacred places, practices, and identities were destroyed: desecrated.

Fundamentalism attempts to strip non-Christian places of holiness. In ignorant zeal, we carried our hubris like holy water, dousing non-Christian places with self righteous prayers. God remained contained in a limited worldview until my resoluteness faded. It no longer made sense that God was only available to the western (white) Christian practitioner, that the only holy places were modern buildings on busy street corners, and the most sacred meals were allocated for true believers. 

Wonder is an antidote for dogma and I found myself wondering about the world as a whole, the people who occupy it, the sacred rituals they practice.

What if my understanding of love is embodied in the personhood of Jesus, but another’s is embodied in the personhood of the Buddha or the practices of Shinto? What if wisdom permeates the world and our missionizing tendencies disrupt the already sacred places, the already wise practices? 

In his book Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys, Native theologian Richard Twiss explored the integration of Christian theology with his Lakota heritage. He advocated for syncretism—the practice of merging multiple religions and traditions. White Christianity cautioned him to abandon his identity and culture in favor of a one-note, white-washed variation of Christianity. He’d been missionized towards assimilation, but he held fast to his heritage, compelled by the beauty and wisdom ways of his inherited identity. 

He wrote, “As a ‘syncretist’ I have a core allegiance to Jesus as Creator that is enriched, further informed and inspired by traditional Lakota ceremonial ways and beliefs. I am able to hold the ‘exclusive’ claims of Christ in tension with the religious claims of other Indigenous ways that I embrace, and lose nothing of my faith in Jesus in the process.”

In Twiss’ view, Christianity isn’t exclusive at all. The way of Christ is a way of wisdom and that wisdom is attainable throughout the world, in all practices and traditions whether the name of Christ is uttered or not because the sacred supersedes language, dwells amongst us as creator-connected beings. In honoring the sacred, we encounter the divine.

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Last week, Jordan and I stumbled upon an ancient Shinto shrine built amongst cedars and Japanese redwoods. Moss grew thick like a shag carpet and hydrangeas bloomed in the dappled sunlight. The temple doors opened, revealing a small group of worshippers, shoeless and kneeling. Someone was praying and singing and beating a gong. Rain fell softly on the piney canopy above and a breeze wafted through the place like God’s breath.

There was no foreboding sense of darkness, no discomfort with an unfamiliar religion. I walked up stone stairs to an ancient cemetery, brushed my hands over thick cedar trunks, witnessed worship I did not understand, and felt pure serenity. No prickles of discomfort, no sense of darkness in a non-Christian space.

In the Shinto faith, divinity dwells within natural things. Sacredness extends far beyond temple walls out into the moss and river banks and understory. I’d once been convinced of a limited god, bound to the pages of an complicated text, felt within the lyrics of a Chris Tomlin song, tasted (not literally) in sugary juice and stale crackers, experienced only when my heart posture was worthy.

So I released my contained god.