Yesterday, I spoke about drawing lines as both Moses and Christ did in the first reading and Gospel. In relation to drawing lines, I mentioned about the pervasiveness of the gated communities as a form of drawing lines. Unfortunately, we have drawn them too short. We have made personal security to be the line that defines us. What happens when the lines of personal safety that we have drawn are breached? Where do we run to and what happens to the self?
The answer must lie in enlarging the public sphere without which we cannot exist as a civilised people. This space must be reclaimed by all and for all so that public discourse and meaningful interactions may take place. Otherwise, we will have to retreat behind the anonymous walls of twittering, blogging and face-booking and from there, shout into the void called the public arena. It is when we do not claim this public space for all that those who believe that "might is right" will flourish. That is why tyranny and dictatorship exist.
The word alone is not really a “lonesome” word. Alone does not mean “alone”. Instead, alone means that one is not with others. In effect, the need to be alone throws the individual back into the community—otherwise known as the public space—against which one can claim the privacy or solitude needed. The Gospel today urges us to listen to Christ’s words and act on them. What do listening and acting mean if not living in the public arena? Holiness does not cordon us from the world or cocoon us into what is merely our personal space but brings us into the heart of the public square where the battle for Christ is fought and won. And to do that, we must draw the lines for public arena to exist. In doing so, we are not drawing lines in order to be self-righteous. Instead, we are drawing lines to be righteous for that is what it means to build our lives upon the rock of Christ. That was yesterday.
Today I would like to focus on drawing another line. This time it is the line for the sacred. Let me begin by calling your attention to the projection before Sunday Masses. One of the slides concerns propriety in dressing. Some people have reacted to it. Let me explain the context for the slide. It was printed about 4 years ago. It arose from the youths themselves who felt that people ought to be educated on their dressing. If you go to other parishes, you will find notices posted with details of what is or not accepted as appropriate. Why the long wait before we put it out? Even this recent putting up the slide and distributing the leaflets came as a request from the youth ministry.
The reluctance of putting up such a sign is due to the fact that we have not sufficiently accepted the necessity to draw a line for the sacred. So, this evening I would like to attempt an explanation of why we should.
Our society, in general, believes that lines or boundaries are not necessary to human interactions. Perhaps what is truer is that the lines or boundaries have already been decided according to a liberal agenda. From this perspective, the Church has often been viewed as having a fortress or siege mentality because she has some rigid boundaries. What happened after Vatican II, was a process of blurring the line between the sacred and the profane. This blurring continues—with regard to human reproduction, to marriage and to family. With regard to the Church, a nagging feeling that the Church is too rigid comes from this “blurring” that has taken place.
But consider this. When God created the heavens and the earth, all was in a formless mass. Then God drew a line between night and day. He drew a line between land and sea. He drew the greatest line between animals and Man. You know the creation story. Suffice to say that even God drew lines. He drew lines limiting His omnipotence in order that we may flourish and exercise freedom. Two things may be said of God’s limiting act. First, it was His prerogative to limit Himself. It does not say that we now have the right to behave more than our freedom allows. In short, it does not mean we get to play God. Second, the boundary that God demarcated was not absolute in the sense that God was absent. God has always been present but we on our part need to draw lines to allow God to be God.
There is a need to recover that line that return to God His sovereignty. We do it not because of who God is but more so because of who we are. Why? God does not need as if He were defective but we need to because we are limited and boundaries acknowledge the limits of our creatureliness.
The attempt to demarcate between the sacred, meaning God’s space and the profane, meaning our space, is sacramental because of who we are. We are sacramental whether we acknowledge it or not. Since we are not spirits, this is translated as giving God time and space. [1]
When we renovated the front porch, a baptismal pool was constructed at the entrance to symbolise the effect that the sacrament of baptism has. It opens the door to the other six sacraments. Without baptism, one cannot receive anointing of the sick, be confirmed, receive Holy Communion, or be ordained. What we use to show that it was a baptismal pool was basically a coconut matt. People were walking on it and wiping their shoes… that was because they did not know what was underneath. Today, there is a demarcation—a sense that this place which can open the door to all the other sacraments is sacred and it must be accorded the dignity befitting its sanctity.
The sacred or a sacred place reminds us that God is present. Sacred places are sacramental reminders that the profane world is shot through with the presence of God. Does it make sense that the early Christians recognised this and their acknowledgement resulted in the monumental and soaring spires of cathedrals and churches? [2]
I am never in favour of demarcating anything for itself. But, the only way to remember that God is everywhere is when we have sacred places. When St Augustine wrote the City of God, Civitas Dei, he was thinking of the City of Man as the preparation for the City of God. Today, we must not forget that drawing lines are important and much more, lines that demarcate sanctity or sacredness. They are measures of our preparation for the Civitas Dei.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This idea that we can worship anywhere is not an absolute idea. It is relative simply because we are embodied spirits. Not forgetting that there is a space, not just any immaterial space, but real space for God is important. Our culture is pregnant with such spiritual presences—maybe not of the God we worship but of the “penunggus, the datuks, the keramats”. Whichever cultures we go to, there is always a sense of the presence of the sacred and that sense is marked off by time and space through what we called ritualised behaviour.
[2] What is more, civilisations can only flourish when God is present. Today, we have mistaken the prowess of progress to be the flourishing of civilisation. We seem to think that technological advancement is the only measure of civilisation. Is it?
