Customer Reviews

Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity

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Sheldrake roots his theology the sacramental catholicity of space where the particular points toward the universal. Sheldrake says that sacramentality is not the "eccentric intrusion of grace, or godly space into what is otherwise a profane world." Rather we live in a "sacramental universe or graced nature" which suggests "God's free self disclosure and self-giving" and "demands a human response." He suggests that God is the only truly catholic place and yet the incarnation anchors human experience of the sacred in the radically particular. The beyondness of God becomes known in the particular, transcending particularity through an intimate "presence as action" within all things. Sheldrake draws heavily upon social theorist Michel de Certeau when he suggests that we "practice place." Coupling the ideas that places are never complete and always growing in meaning with the idea that catholicity is about "expectancy, continuous transformation and about a process of becoming" the world begins to vibrate with revelatory potential in any and all places but never contained fully in any one.
One of the most powerful contributions that Sheldrake offers readers is Eucharistic places. Sacramentalism must mean more than a simply "graced world;" a fully sacramental approach to place is necessarily an ethical approach. The Eucharist is an "enactment of the special (and ethical) identity of the Christian community" which is to re-enacted in the rest of the world through further reconciliation and solidarity. And since places are always changing, we strive for a universal reconciliation and redemption of the broken world. This Eucharistic practice shapes the body of Christ in particular ways, and the space in which the body occupies offers a profound freedom to each member against homogenization of place and people. These places of reconciliation the body of Christ fills become places of hope amidst despair. The places become places of profoundly contradictory and ambiguous memory: where despair and horror are reconfigured, but not suppressed, into the narrative of Christ.
I highly recommend Sheldrake's proposal and potentials for those wanting to consider a sacramental vision of place.