I’ve been thinking about and living into moments of sacred space the last month. What makes a space sacred? What makes a particular time sacred? Are these places and the times in which they appear separate entities, or are they connected into a single thread of the greater fabric of space-time? I lean towards the latter: space and time are unified in a single, holy experience.

But what designates these space-times as holy? What sets them aside as something other than our mundane existence? The more I grapple with the question, the more I think that these sacred spaces and moments are not filled with anything “extra” holy; rather, I find that they are actually void. They are holes in our daily routines.

These places are sacred because they are spacious. They invite us to leave our mundane to-do lists, our anxious pressure to be productive, our worries about past, present, and future. When we enter a sacred space, we cross a boundary, and like a coat rack, that boundary invites us to hang up all the noise that distracts us from the holy, even if only for a few moments.

Like Inanna descending into the underworld, we come spiritually naked into the space, and the space holds us in our vulnerability. Humbled in the silence of the space, we experience a Mystery: We are held by nothing, and we hold nothing; nothing comes alive as something. We look into the void, and the void looks back upon us.

We transcend the notions of “I”, “me”, “you”, and “other.” And Truth comes not from our separateness but from the relationship that swirls about the space. In the Living Void, we are undifferentiated, we are truly being.

I venture to say that sacred space is not really made or found; it is realized. It is experienced as real when we intentionally cross that boundary into the void. This boundary can be physical, like entering into a temple or place of worship; it can be energetic, like the making of a magic Circle; it can be cognitive, like calming the mind into meditation. The void of scared space exists along all axes of our experience. We need only to sink down into it to transcend to the holy.