Looking for Holy Ground

If you tour Eastern Europe, you’ll find centuries-old Orthodox cathedrals and churches, which are both popular tourist attractions and sacred places. The specifics of what attire is acceptable vary – in Orthodox churches men must not have their heads covered, but in some, women must. Men must also wear long pants and keep their hands out of their pockets, while women need long skirts or pants and a shirt with sleeves.

Some cathedrals even post security officers at their doors to prevent anyone from entering whose sartorial choices are off-code. For some worship spaces, there are specific conduct requirements as well. For example, visitors to Buddhist temples must always walk around in a clockwise direction and feet must never be pointed toward the altar or an image of the Buddha. And in many temples and churches, photography is prohibited.

But whether it’s heads covered or uncovered, shoes on or off, some other dress or behavior requirement, the principle is the same: The holiness of the space is to be shown respect by adherence to dress and conduct codes.

That’s not difficult to understand, and most of us would cooperate with such rules when visiting places that others have designated as holy. It’s not as clear that we would recognize the holiness in some other locations that have not been so designated – such as the site of the burning bush on Mt. Horeb.

As the story goes, Moses was on that mountain tending his father-in-law’s flock when he saw the bush blazing but not burning up. As he moved toward it, God spoke to him out of the bush, saying, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).

That’s the point at which this story starts to make some of us queasy, for if we’d been in Moses’ sandals, would we have been convinced enough to obey? Some of us might have thought, “Yeah, right, this is holy ground. Who’s kidding whom here? This is just the surface of Mt. Horeb. And whatever is going on with the bush, it’s liable to start throwing off burning embers at any moment, so I’m not taking my sandals off.” And if we’d responded like that, there’s a good chance we’d have missed an encounter with God.

A fellow named Brenton attended a worship service where the preacher was talking about his personal conversion to Christ. In telling that story, the preacher got a little weepy. As soon as he did, Brenton lost the thread of the sermon by wondering if the preacher had the words “weep here” written in the margin of his sermon notes as a theatrical cue. They might have been on holy ground, and there might have been something important that God wanted Brenton to hear from that sermon, but if so, he missed it because he had the shoes of skepticism securely laced on his feet.

That happened in church, where we commonly expect God might speak to us, but church is not the only place where we ought to be scrambling to pull our metaphorical shoes off. Here are a few other places that could be holy ground:

* You are taking a walk when an idea occurs to you about some change you need to make in your life.

* You are reading a book when something you have read suddenly comes alive for you.

* You are in the midst of an argument with a family member and are quite angry when something clicks inside your head and you remember that you love this person you are so angry at. That realization can cause the ground to shift under you, and there is suddenly a holy opportunity regarding your relationship with that person.

* You are in the midst of trouble or are depressed over the course of life, and receive one of those “I’m thinking of you” cards from a friend.

Those examples don’t overtly refer to God or Christ. They may or may not seem like religious experiences. Some, at best, might be called only “everyday holiness.” Yet if we have any acquaintance with the concept of holiness, we will recognize that there are elements in moments such as those described that go beyond the ordinary, beyond the routine, beyond the mundane.

There is something about them that, if we are alert, tells us not to let the moment slip by without giving thanks, or apologizing, or saying, “I love you” to someone, or changing our attitude, or taking an exploratory step in a direction we think God might be pushing us, or at least appreciating the moment.

But there are three dangers when we are on holy ground.

The first is that we will fail to notice that the ground beneath our feet is holy. Imagine, for example, hearing a sermon that challenges a certain attitude or way of living and sitting there thinking, “Boy, I wish so and so could hear this; he really needs it,” and never once considering that the sermon might also fit our own situation.

A few lines from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning recall the burning bush story and indicate the possibility of failing to notice that one is on holy ground:

Earth’s crammed with heaven

And every common bush afire with God;

And only he who sees takes off his shoes –

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Failing to recognize that we are on holy ground isn’t necessarily a sin, but it is blockage on the spiritual journey.

The second danger when we are on holy ground is that we spend too much time on analysis and argue it away. Consider the conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well in Samaria. He asks her for a drink of water, which leads to a conversation about living water, spiritual sustenance. Then Jesus says to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

The woman’s response, however, shows that she has no idea that she is on holy ground. Instead of taking off her sandals of skepticism, she asks an analytical question: “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” And then, as if that isn’t enough, she adds a second one: “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”

Fortunately, Jesus persists in the discussion, and she eventually realizes that she is in the presence of, at the very least, a prophet, and eventually she grasps that Jesus is the Messiah (John 4:4-26).

The third danger is that we will want to enshrine the experience and stay there. After Peter, James and John saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain, they were so overcome that they wanted the experience to go on and on. Peter even offered to build three booths or shrines, one for each of the persons who had been involved in the transfiguration: Elijah, Moses and Jesus. But Jesus would not allow it. And then he led them back down the mountain to the ground of everyday life (Matthew 17:1-8).

You may have had something similar happen. Perhaps you went to a retreat, a conference, a renewal service or some other event where you experienced the presence of God in a special way, a kind of spiritual high. But then the event was over, and when you came home, still in the afterglow, nothing seemed as changed as you were. Not even going to church enabled you to recapture that same spiritual high point.

From time to time, God invites us onto holy ground for spiritual renewal and growth. Most of the time, however, he seems to want us to walk on the ordinary ground of everyday life. But it is good to do so with our spiritual sensors turned on, aware that holy ground is intermingled with it.

What is your “holy ground” experience?

If you were going to write a book about your holy ground experience, what would be its subject? Would it be about your family? Would it be about surviving a serious illness? Would it be about your daily quiet times of devotions? Would it be about dark valleys you’ve gone through, but where you found that God was with you? Would it simply be about everyday blessings? Or something else?

There is a lot more holy ground around than we are normally conscious of. Holy ground can be found in the darndest places. Let’s look for those places, take our sandals off, and fully experience the blessedness of the moment and discover what God wants us to make of it.