"When the Sacred Manifests Itself"

“When the Sacred Manifests Itself”
This reading had a profound impact on me from the beginning of the semester. Throughout all of my spiritual exploration, Eliade’s enthusiasm and certainty for the presence of the sacred has inspired me to look for beauty in places that I otherwise would not have. Eliade’s description of those who reject the reality of the divine makes it sound like it is only they who are missing out, and how it is a shame it is to deny something that chooses to reveal itself to you and only you.
I love the way that Eliade describes the difference between the physical space of a sacred place versus a profane one. Nonspiritual people lay claim to a spatial homogeneity, in which there is no interruption of the sacred in the continuous vastness. However, for the believer, “revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to ‘found the world’ and to live in a real sense. ''
This is one of my favorite quotes I have ever heard.
Eliade describes a spiritual existence that is not antiquated and irrelevant, impossible to reconcile with the modern context. Eliade’s faith is completed by true inner peace, for the ability to obtain that ‘fixed point’ in the chaos of the temporal existence is a sign of balance. At the end of the day, his words compel me to a deeper insistence on the reality of the sacred.
Eliade insists on a “spatial nonhomogeneity”. To me, this is reassurance that there are those sacred places that disrupt the fabric of the monotonous and desacralized existence.
For instance:
The place where I first learned of God, and held the idea in such child-like faith.
The place in the woods where I wander alone
The place where I prayed and the significance of it all became revealed to me
The place where I played a song that came to me from a place more sacred than I’d ever been
Some people like the term miracle. I prefer Eliade’s hierophany. The manifestation of the sacred as it reveals itself to us. I believe each hierophany left a substantial impact on the physical space, at the very least for me, possibly for others. After all, the desacralized world sounds terribly boring…
Without hierophanies, without nonhomogoneity, there is no fixed point in this temporality. There is no disruption of meaninglessness, only endless repetition. I, for one, would rather believe in something and be wrong than believe in nothing and incredibly bored.

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