Holy Spaces

Holy Spaces

Location is everything.

Space is important – how we style it after our own taste, how we feel when we are in it, and who it helps us become. 

We inherently crave spaces in which we feel like our best selves. 

For the first eleven years of our marriage, Barrett and I were able to ponder whether our living spaces were becoming of who we were.  We had a choice in the matter and control over our home purchase.  Up until today, we had purchased and lived in three different homes and each was off the beaten path. Pizza wasn’t even delivered to these addresses.  Each home had qualities we hated and qualities we loved, but the main gig of homeownership is it’s your space. 

I didn’t realize how much I took for granted, the ability to choose my neighborhood and which one of the four square walls we’d come home to until we lost those choices.  Yanked from the outskirts of Upstate, New York, to the middle of it all, in Central Florida, we said sayonara to late nights on a private deck with lightning bugs, twinkling stars, and the sound of crickets. 

Here’s why: 

Our current home, building number twenty, sits at the busy rear entrance of the three-quarters mile-long complex, lined with identical units.  This location was not our choice.  We were told which unit we’d be residing in and had no clue what it would lead to.  In a brisk, two-minute walk from our front door, we can stop by a liquor store, suck down a chocolate milkshake at Steak & Shake, or trade our children in at a pawn shop (just kidding!).  If we really want to have fun, we do all three on the same night.

Out of three hundred one, two, and three-bedroom apartment units in the entire complex, only one lucky unit resides fifteen feet from the apartment complex activity center - ours.  Our small, back porch sits on one of the most well-worn paths in the complex.  That path is semi-hidden behind our twelve-unit building, and seven others, which collectively, form a hollowed-out courtyard.  When we do open our blinds (times when twenty-five people staring in at us isn’t bothersome), the view from our back window has been a dilapidated activity center, a decent-sized, but neglected community pool, and a very sorry looking children’s playground.  It wasn’t exactly the Berkshires.

But as with any space or location, we can see what is there and leave it at that, or see what could be, and use our divine imagination to live into what it can become.  While any courtyard you come across may feel like a modern-day solution to cramped urban space, courtyards are actually very intentional and notable historical spaces.  Courtyards date back to the thirteenth century when shared space around a group of houses was a common custom, especially among the Incas. 

Apartment 287 taught me why the Incas held fast to the tradition of a shared courtyard:  In any context – rural or urban, busy or slow - a hollowed-out space serves as a stationary reminder of every human being’s need for community, rest, play, and open sky. 

A hollowed-out space is ripe with infinite possibilities for design and purpose, but how hard would the imagination have to work to see a neglected, dirty, and worn space at the rear of some ill-managed, city apartment complex become more than uncut grass and broken playground equipment?

Is there even a chance for a space such as this to become - holy?

It has been implicitly taught for thousands of years – through tradition and fear – that the prerequisites for a space to be deemed sacred are 1) the space should contain items of extravagant beauty and 2) the space shall operate in continued stillness.  Think: church, museums, libraries, courtrooms, and graveyards.  Beginning five years ago, however, apartment 287 boldly challenged these stiff prerequisites for my family.

Was what I assumed about a holy space wrong? 

Maybe so.

Was a location I could hardly open my blinds to – and thought of as a nuisance - actually a divine blessing, a becoming place of resurgence and hope, but in disguise?

Quite possibly.

Through inclusive play, and under hot rays of Florida sunshine, we claimed this beat-up courtyard’s sacred worth.

Scattered throughout this courtyard are thirteen tall, skinny palm trees (convenient for getting balls caught in), bushy, tropical landscaping, and a three-foot-high electrical box serving as “home base” for every sporadic game of tag we’ve played over the past five years.  For four years, the courtyard’s three-bedroom apartments were filled with families with young children like ourselves, seeking inclusion, rest, and open sky.  And from Jared’s and Leah’s first step off the back porch, our children were enthusiastically enveloped by the courtyard’s frenzy of playful children freely running around.  Hosting an array of ages, skin colors, and cultures, there was no discrimination.  Two-and-a-half-year old’s wearing diapers played with fifteen-year old’s enduring puberty’s finer moments.  Unlike most new spaces and places adults choose or pay to join, joining this mob of kids was quick and easy.  

Do you like to play?

Do you use your imagination?

Yes?

You’re in.

Courageously stepping outside the thick lines of religious tradition and ignoring deep-seated fear, apartment 287 declared the sacredness of a space organically swells up from the alignment and zeal of the people inside it.  A space, with the right people in it, can be taken from rusty and hollow, to rich and treasured.  With each person inside, leaning into the embracing love of one another and God, subversive beauty is created (not bought, displayed, or bestowed) through the routine celebration of a group’s eclectic differences and humble similarities.

This kind of sacred magic doesn’t happen just anywhere.  

The courtyard’s sacredness grew out of being a hands-on zone dominated with kids figuring out life through running free, swimming, chasing, climbing, building forts, getting dirty and yelling “You’re it” in the burning sun of a Florida afternoon.  Long talks – many of which I became involved in with teenage girls - were had at the bottom of the twisty, green slide.  And for more than eighty percent of the time, the kids and teens were unattended.  Every now and then, a parent stopped by for a New York minute, but having no accountability or structure, this free play - including veering onto our convenient back porch - would continue for hours, sometimes until ten at night.

The number of scraped knees, alligator tears (short-lived - no parent to wipe them away) and near-drownings is too many for Barrett and me to count.  From our sliding glass door, we would watch kids jump over the locked fence of the unguarded pool.  Children created the entertainment their busy bodies and brains were seeking – some ideas were good and some not so good, like taking turns peeling chunks of paint off the outside walls of buildings and throwing it into the grass.  Then there were the out of control boys constantly climbing onto the roof of the unkempt activity center.  Little girls, meanwhile, including mine, were always at the bottom yelling at them to come down.

This rowdy courtyard of eccentric children has been a dynamic, reliable, and fun space of Jared’s and Leah’s life here in Winter Park.  The play here is different than other places we bring them. 

How many places in life can claim the art of inclusive play has been perfected and guarantee that loneliness quickly evaporates? 

At almost any time, a bored child can step into the uncut grass off their back porch,  and within three and a half minutes, another child spotting him or her from their apartment’s window will run out to join forces (on several occasions, I have wished my friends lived here too, so they could instantly appear when I am low on patience or chocolate).

Drinking hot cups of light coffee from our back porch, Barrett and I would scout out the courtyard for potential threats.   From three palm trees away, children or teenagers would spot us quasi watching from our cheap, white, plastic chairs.  The book on my lap or the pen in my hand was not the deterrents I thought they were.  After being spotted, a mob of sweaty, frizzy-haired children would dart across the courtyard and sit side-by-side on the peach cement walls of our porch.   I always gave in to the frizzy hair and toothless smiles and I’d set my book down (notice I did not set my coffee down).   “Hey, guys!  How y'all doing today?”

Months went by.

Same old routine.

Our questions turned into conversations and conversations turned into understanding.  With each passing weekend, it became less about scouring for potential threats and more about befriending a bored kid or being “it” in a game of tag.  It wasn’t long until handy-man Barrett was fixing flat bicycle tires and I was setting out bowls of candy and pitchers of lemonade.  

These children didn’t know the couple serving them lemonade, fixing their flat, and talking to them about spaghetti and the Tooth Fairy had arrived in Florida financially and spiritually broken.

So, is there even a chance for a space such as this to become - holy? 

Yes. 

Yes.

Yes.

Because even through the shy giggles and dirty faces of unattended children, the divine speaks. 

And even through a down and out couple, the divine continues loving.

This space - with its scattered candy bar wrappers on the ground, a green tinge to the pool, and kids climbing all over the furniture on our porch - reopened a closed-off space within us.  The courtyard rebutted the old-fashioned claim that holiness is equated with perfection, morality or the drop of even one dime.  The holy spirit will find a way to dance – poor, dirty, and worn – especially among children.  

Broken adults fixed broken bikes. 

Broken kids wiped tears off cheeks of broken friends. 

In a neglected space no one cared about, our misfit crew cooked up meaning. Together, we gave each other someone and something to believe in and swelled the space with a contagious joy.  

Is there even a chance for a space such as this to become holy?

Yes.

But here’s the rule:  In this place of grass and dirt, no one claimed or assumed status or perfection.  We all had wounds - whether we showed them or not - including Barrett and I.  Yet we chose to anoint the dirty space with rich laughter.  As we wrapped kids in hugs, the courtyard unapologetically expanded our suffocating definition of sacred space - traditionally defined as brick, mortar, quiet, lavish - can look like, and where a genuinely divine experience can happen. 

From the space, intentional community blossomed, and from intentional community, delicate, but powerful seeds of grace grew in the heart of my family.    

These seeds of grace, planted by a loving community, has uplifted us when we were down and children at our door have obliged us to surface when we’d rather stay hidden.  In laughing, loving and inclusive communities boldly claiming – not shaking - their imperfections, lasting hope, and deep strength are discovered. 

There was no altar, no choir, and no one ever dressed up.  Yet, my Methodist roots could hear the divine whispering, “Pay attention.  This space - its people, its rhythm, its cracks, and dents, it's color, its diversity, and it's unfolding light - are teaching you; and those lessons, Annette would never have been learned from your walk-in-closet on London Lane.”  

On the edge of a beautiful city, from the periphery of that mucky courtyard, my family was invited into blurring the lines we draw between people who are different from us and to color outside the lines we draw around people who don’t look like us. 

To the children enduring tough storms at home - the courtyard became a sacred refuge.  Barrett and I stepped off the porch and into the grass, in order to stop holding back.  We learned how to gently love from anywhere, even barefoot and from old plastic chairs on our small, back porch.  Whispers of the courtyard’s vulnerable awakened in our hearts, a deep generosity we thought we couldn’t afford (literally) anymore.

So, while distant suburbs, ponds, and four-wheelers once kept us disconnected from those who are most vulnerable, the courtyard drew us in. 

Because that’s what holy space does.

It draws you in.

And that’s how you know – and how we knew we were in it. 

Christians or not, Barrett and I would have been pumping tires and handing out water balloons.  I think it is just in our nature to pitch in.  But using our imaginations, we played with the divine and relied on the willingness of one another to help us see what the courtyard could become - instead of just what it was.  I don’t know if we hit the nail on the head, or if we terribly misfired, but all that time spent in that dusty courtyard has carried into who we are as a family and into a prayer for the children after they all go home.  

As an architect’s plans for a building include a courtyard, may our life plans include sacred space where imperfections are embraced and all are welcome - no matter how white, black, young, old, skinny, fat, quiet or loud you are!  May our lives be built around opportunities of intentional connection with fellow travelers so together, we can create refuge for lonely children and raise up a community of courageous friends under the open sky.  

Peace,

Annette