Today we visited Richmond’s famous ‘Highway to Heaven.’ Developing along Highway No. 5, there are some 26 religious centers, temples, synagogues, churches and gurdwaras. These centers have been eager to cooperate and recently put on an art exhibit at the Richmond Museum. We didn’t get to visit all of them, and the Shia Mosque was closed. A wonderful Chinese woman gave us a tour of the Pure Land temple and we were offered a lovely vegetarian dinner with the nuns and lay people preparing floats for Canada Day. We sat in for the last few minutes of the Tibetan Buddhist Temple’s daily chant and marvelled at the massive Shakyamuni statuary. It got me thinking; I focus on spiritual ecology, mostly on forests; so is spiritual ecology just something that occurs outside? Or is it anywhere we create a spiritual oikos, a spiritual home. Sacred spaces like temples can sometimes be used to delineate sacred from profane, inside from outside; but they can also point us toward the holy in everything. Sacred spaces are microcosms of the macrocosm (the hole is in the parts). They orient us, instruct us, allow us to practice being human for when we step outside into the messy complex world. If we learn to see the holy in the particular, it can more easily be seen/felt in the universal. Thoughts?
holyscapes 