St. Louis Cemetery #1. New Orleans LouisianaSacred spaces are not always those spaces that are intended to be sacred. Without spiritual insight, all the capital and planning in the world cannot succeed in making a space sacred. That is why designed sacred spaces so often fail. That is why so many churches and temples seem about as sacred as a shopping mall. Inversely, spaces never designed to be sacred, can be.
And sometimes, a sacred space is a place that most people avoid. Sacred spaces need not attract people; sometimes they can make people uncomfortable. They smile kindly on those who will learn from them, and they will deter the unready. They will not be user-friendly or fit in with our designs or our modern consciousness. They will not accommodate.
My favorite sacred spaces are like that. They are cemeteries.
Carl Jung spoke of the shadow, which consists of the parts of ourselves we repress. Unpleasant truths we would rather not face. Any person who spent any time in a cemetery honestly meditating on what it represents, would soon come to grips with something most people would rather not think about a great deal. The vanity of worldly objectives, the foolishness of the human species, the total effacement of our dreams and goals in the face of impassive Time.
And yet, somehow, I feel happier in cemeteries than I do in almost any other place. When you erase what is false, what is true must soon come into view. When you erase what is transitory, what is eternal has room to make its presence known. Cemeteries are a reminder of eternity beyond this mortal life. For some people, it is an unpleasant reminder. For me, it is like coming into a beautiful private garden which is hidden in a ghetto. The air of cemeteries feels cleaner, the dead for me more pleasant company, than I usually find in the land of the living.
When you compare the attention that previous ages gave to the abodes of the dead, with the attention that we give now, it is clear that we have actually regressed in our ability to face the unpleasant truths that cemeteries have to teach us. This is not completely our fault: in Victorian and earlier times, people had their faith in God to act as a buffer between them and the grave. This was a faith that was held with far greater conviction than is common today. With the advent of a more secular and scientific society, most of us are actually less able to assimilate the truths that graveyards can teach us.
As a result of our evasion of the meaning of death, cemeteries themselves become less of an intentionally sacred place and more like an industrial field of identical grave markers, like a field of corn waiting for the mechanized combine harvester, or like transistors on a computer chip. But modern cemeteries, no matter how much they have tried to extract every drop of soul from them, still fulfill the ancient function. Even the most dispirited modern cemetery is an unpleasant truth, a lacuna in the mind of modernity, an albatross around the neck of the perky modern consumer unit.
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you.
Antique postcard of the Pere Lachaise cemetery columbarium, Paris.
(A columbarium is a place for the storage of cremation urns)
What is evident from the picture is that people visited these places,
the majority of the niches have flowers
