Thinking about Sacred Spaces

The idea for this piece is to think a bit about what we might mean by ‘sacred spaces’ and how this connects with mission. In particular, I want to look at how we might make connections with people who don’t see themselves as having any affiliation with Christianity or the church by making ‘spaces’, in a broad sense, available to bridge the gap. To help me do this, I’m going to attempt to reflect theologically on an experience I had a few months back. I can’t promise this will be entirely clear or fully-formed, but it captures where my thinking is at currently.

For the past two years, I’ve organised the Transgender Day of Remembrance events in Milton Keynes. This happened quite by accident! I agreed to help another transgender person to organise something, as Pink Punters had stopped providing a coach to take people down to the London event. We had an initial meeting and I said I’d do a few of the jobs around the edge of things, and no more than that. However, due to illness, this friend, who’d agreed to do the majority of the work, bailed out with a week and a half to go. We’d already invited the then mayor to come, and she’d accepted. As all the others in the small team we’d put together dropped out too, I realised if I didn’t do something, it would be me, Sally and the mayor! So, I set about doing the publicity, putting together the plan for the evening, found people to do readings and so on. I also, rather by default, ended up leading the event on the day, too. As no-one answered my plea for help last year I planned and ran the event then, too.

For a bit of background, TDOR is held on 20th November each year and remembers those killed throughout the world for being (or being perceived to be) gender-variant. This encompasses transsexuals (those going through or who have gone through gender reassignment), cross-dressers/transvestites, people who don’t feel they fit into either of the binary categories we usually employ, or fit into both, or who experience gender as something fluid and varying, and so on!

It was started to mark the killing of Rita Hester in the United States, who was a transgender activist and campaigner, and is now held across the world in several countries. In most places, the commemorations consist of reading the list of the names of those killed in the past year, along with poetry, music, prayers and so on. Most events are held in, and organised by, religious communities of one sort or another. Ours was therefore somewhat unusual in being a secular event, though I did incorporate a version of a prayer written by a Rabbi specifically for TDOR in both years, as it is rather beautiful.

Our event has been held in a small room in the city centre church in both years. We chose this venue because it’s central and easy to get to, has a room which is the right size and cheap to hire, and I felt it was a safe space. The free church minister knew what was happening, was supportive and gave permission for us to use the room, but it was not an ‘official’ church event – this would’ve been difficult as though I’ve been accepted without any problems (or at least if people have had problems with me being transgender then they’ve not expressed them to me!), the mix of the congregation is such that many don’t approve of homosexuality, and no doubt would struggle with transgender issues if they knew about them!

In 2013, we had over forty people attend and were supported financially and with publicity by the local LGBT Pride organisation. Some of the participants and certainly our sponsor knew that I am a Christian and more specifically a Methodist local preacher, however they understood that. I’m also going through gender reassignment at the moment, and identify as a transsexual man. Our TDOR brought many into the church who wouldn’t darken its doorstep in normal circumstances; for some, it was their first time inside a church, and others hadn’t been in a church building for many a year. People commented on how they’d always thought churches were cold and unwelcoming and this had blown their stereotype apart, and one of the local LGBT youth group leaders joked about getting the young people to the church on time!

Thus, without really trying, we ended up creating a sacred space, both in the sense of taking an ordinary room and turning into somewhere we could hold a ‘service’ (it did feel very much like a service despite the lack of overt Christian content), and in terms of what we were actually doing. In order to compile the list of names, I had to take a document put together by an organisation that sets out to track these things and extract the information I needed: the name, age and country of origin of each person listed. As this paper details the causes of death of each person, and some of the descriptions are very graphic, it wouldn’t be appropriate just to take the raw document as is. Thus, I’ve gone through and copied the information into a list of my own. It’s by far the hardest bit of running a TDOR, and both times I’ve got through multiple tissues.

It occurred to me before I began that, especially with those people who are never identified, who remain nameless, there may be no-one to pray for them. I find it hard to imagine having nobody to miss you, or to hold you before God; makes me feel emotional just thinking about it. As I was compiling the list, it struck me that God was asking me to pray for the folks I was reading about, and the people who were gathering to remember to hold them too, in a prayerful way, in love and respect. Importantly, we also remember the people who’ve been driven to suicide because of the way they’ve been discriminated against; they aren’t included in the list I mentioned, yet matter just as much.

I think that’s actually quite a priestly thing to do; as we hold the world before God in prayer when we intercede, so we were holding those people before God in TDOR, consciously or otherwise depending on the participant’s views. Additionally, it’s an active, rather than passive, kind of remembering, akin to that in the Eucharist in that makes a conscious connection and gives a degree of dignity to those cruelly deprived of it by violence and hatred. Consequently, I would argue that whether they knew it or not, our TDOR participants were behaving as the people of God in that space, in that thirty minute act of remembering and hoping.

Moreover, it was a chance to invite un-churched, to use the jargon of fresh expressions, people into the building, including as I said the local LGBT youth group, and make them feel welcome and safe in the space we created. I hope it broke down some of the hostility there sadly can be between LGBT people and religious groups. As I’ve noted already, that was probably made easier by going under the ‘official’ church radar, yet it was by its nature missional, both because it got them across the threshold of a church building, but I think also because many knew I’m a lay preacher, and more importantly because of the nature of our actions on those days. What we were doing wasn’t part of a traditional church pattern, nor was it a fresh expression, but something in the gap between the two: mission for the moment, or mission in the gaps.

In her book ‘Journeying Out’, Ann Morisy talks about apt liturgy. By this, she means words and actions that are appropriate for a particular community at a crucial moment, probably involving minimal overt Christian content but not totally devoid of it, which expresses the thoughts and feelings of those people, giving them the space to deal with the situation at hand. It points to something beyond their ordinary experience of life, without bombarding them with religious language or dogma, and invites them to perhaps begin to see something of a bigger picture beyond the material world. I think that, without consciously thinking about it, that’s what happened in those TDOR gatherings. Apt liturgy is one way of bridging gaps.

Romans 15:13 and Paul’s words in abounding in hope come to mind here. Each time we had two poems written and read by transgender people, the reading of the names, silence, prayer and music. First time we used ‘Something Inside so Strong’ and second time ‘True Colours’; these seemed to capture the mood well, and offer encouragement and hope, as well as an opportunity for remembrance, which I think is very important. I think I can say the ‘space’, both physical and otherwise, was sacred because it opened up room for the God of resurrection and new beginnings to be at work, pointing to something more than the grim reality of prejudice against transgender folks, as well as making a connection with and honouring those who had died.

Moreover, without trying I think we created something akin to the temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, written about by Hakim Bey in a 1991 essay. Essentially, a TAZ zone is a temporary space that subverts the normal rules and eludes formal structures of control. An example outside the church might be the camps set up during the Occupy movement, with no explicit hierarchy and enabling the establishing of different kinds of relationship. In our context, though we had permission of a sort from the church hierarchy, it wasn’t an ‘official’ event and we left to get on with it. Had the wider community known about it, it may not have been possible to do; it subverted the normal rules of what can and cannot be done in church! Everybody joined in reading the names together; this was very important, as it meant though I was in one sense leading, or perhaps facilitating is a better word, the event, each person’s own remembering was equally important and valid and real.

I realise I’ve talked about sacred spaces in various senses here, both in terms of physical spaces transformed into ‘TAZ zones’ and spiritual (for want of a better word) spaces created by priestly actions, by using apt liturgy. I acknowledge my thinking on this is not fully coherent, and that this is a (rather long) stream of consciousness piece. Yet I think at the heart of all of this is that when Jesus is welcomed in somewhere and/or by someone, whether that’s through overtly Christian prayer, words and actions (so we might speak of cathedrals or places like Iona as being ‘thin places’ as they’ve been soaked in prayer) or via welcoming, remembering, honouring the most vulnerable in God’s world, then transformation happens and sacred spaces are formed. I come back to Matthew 25 and the parable of the sheep and the goats: what you do for the least of God’s children, you do for Christ. That’s got to be a door onto the sacred, right?