Are we zoning out sacred space?

Americans can find paradise without putting up a parking lot--when they begin to see every place as holy ground.

One Monday last July, I spent the hour before sunset in Glacier National Park watching in silence the sort of view God and Ansel Adams have made famous. As lengthening blue shadows climbed out of the forested valley beneath me, I also watched the occasional van or jeep make its way down from the summit, roll past me, and head back toward the campsites and hotels on the western side of the park. Only when the last sunlight had retreated to small glistening colonies at the tops of the surrounding peaks did I decide, regretfully, to get back on my bike and bring up the rear of the descending caravan.

In Landscapes of the Sacred (Paulist, 1988), Belden Lane argues that Americans don't have many holy places. We're too migratory, always on the way to someplace else, enamored by the song of the open road. From the beginning we've been trying to carve a path to someplace else, looking for a trade route to India, a Northwest passage to the Pacific, or a highway to heaven. Even today, when Frederick Turner's frontier has been closed for a century, we're still on the move, with one fifth of us changing homes every year.

Still there is a strain within us that seems to understand--without always honoring--an appetite for sacred places. And if we lack the Gothic and Baroque cathedrals of Europe, or healing shrines like France's Lourdes or Mexico's Guadalupe, we do feel the tug of Gettysburg, Ellis Island, and the Vietnam Memorial. Places made sacred, as Lincoln argued, by the memory of people who lived and died there.

Or we find ourselves drawn to remote sites "far from the madding crowd," places like Glacier and Yosemite National Parks, or the Shenandoah Valley, where some mixture of wonder and quiet seems to bathe our souls like sunlight. Even in America we don't just make pilgrimages to Disney World, Las Vegas, or The Mall of America. We sometimes go to real places, places with stories, places worth being in, worth remembering.

And we come by this appetite for sacred space honestly. After all, numbers of our ancestors came here looking to find and build a new holy land--a bright shining city on a hill. It was Americans who fashioned and were fascinated by Henry David Thoreau's Walden, the wilderness of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking" tales, and the vast landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole. No wonder, then, that naturalists like John Burroughs and John Muir should have found here such a ready audience for their ideas, or that Teddy Roosevelt's back-to-nature movement was so well received.

The problem, of course, has been that our love of these sacred places has gone hand in hand with our desire to invade, consume, and sometimes trivialize them. So as we flood into these remote places of refuge, we tend to overwhelm, congest, and pollute them with our autos and campers, believing these "natural" sites should be outfitted with all the comforts of home. In "Redefining Sacred Space," a 1994 piece in National Parks, historian Alfred Runte argues that in America our consumerism and individualism get in the way of our sense of sacred space, that for a people committed to having their own cars and their own way, "sacred space is wasted space." Likewise a 1994 article in Time entitled "Going Wild" reports on the various ways that our national parks have been run and marketed not as wild sanctuaries but as theme parks, replete with hotels, restaurants, shops, and golf courses, and how these parks are in real danger of being "overrun by visitors and blighted by development."

But if our attachment to consumption, movement, and automobiles threatens to scar the sacred domain of our national parks, James Kunstler argues in both The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and his more recent Home From Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1997) that these same forces are currently destroying the shared and sacred space of our human habitat, of our homes, towns, and cities.

"Our obsession with mobility, the urge to move on every few years, stands at odds with the wish to endure in a beloved place, and no place can be worthy of that kind of deep love if we are willing to abandon it on short notice for a few extra dollars. Rather, we choose to live in Noplace, and our dwellings show it. In every corner of the nation we have built places unworthy of love and move on from them without regret. But move on to what? Where is the ultimate destination when everyplace is Noplace?"

The "Noplace" Kunstler sees us moving to is the ever-expanding suburban sprawl created by our postwar love affair with automobiles and highways. A sprawl he describes as flat and soulless, lacking character, story, or interest, but most of all lacking the shared space and sense of community once found in towns and cities built for people, not cars. In terms of human space Kunstler doesn't see automobile suburbs as "an adequate replacement for cities, since the motivating force behind suburbia has been the exaltation of privacy and the elimination of the public realm. Where city life optimizes the possibility of contact between different kinds of people, the suburb strives to eliminate precisely that kind of human contact."

Thus, in spite of the fact that American home ownership is at an all-time high, that the average new house has twice the space of homes built in the 1950s, and that we spend $11 billion a year remodeling or decorating these split-level dream houses, Kunstler argues that we are not creating human environments that are capable of nurturing us as persons because we are not paying attention to our public, political, and shared space.

So we can spend as much money and energy as we like reading Martha Stewart, watching "This Old House," or hiring a Feng Shui consultant to realign the inner space of our houses, but we will not create a home worth living in until we recover some sense of our lost "commons," that shared public space that draws us out of our private lives and knits us into real communities. Kunstler's contention is that in the shift to the suburbs we have given up those common spaces that connected us to each other, whether they were city parks, downtown markets, sidewalk cafes, or even those oft-washed stoops from which neighbors used to salute each other on a summer eve. In their place we have been offered the paltry "virtual" neighborhood of the TV and the Internet. No wonder then, that the disappearance of a sense of place, of the significance of particular spaces and locations, is one of the deplorable characteristics of our time.

And Kunstler is hardly alone in his critique of the harms inflicted by suburbia. In a 1995 Nieman Reports essay "Suburban Sprawl: America's Most Important Environmental Issue," Keith Schneider reports on the devastating ecological and financial effects of suburban sprawl. Mush rooming developments have ruined thousands of acres of farmland, rivers, lakes, and natural habitats while inflicting devastating damage on small local communities--replacing their downtown stores and markets with large and remote retail outlets drawing people farther and farther from one another. Kenneth Jackson in "All the World's a Mall," a recent article in the American Historical Review, argues that the emergence of malls has led to the demise of old town centers, enabling Americans to waste energy, time, and--space.

Still in Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Brookings Institution, 1997), Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder argue that the loss or deterioration of shared space is not just the result of suburban flight. Since the end of the 1980s, as many as 8 million Americans have actually been walling themselves off from their neighbors, creating a growing archipelago of middle- and upper-middle-class "gated communities" with limited or no public access. "For those inside the gates," Blakely and Snyder report, "life may be a little more comfortable. For others, however, gated communities symbolize a larger social pattern of social segmentation designed to disassociate and exclude. America is increasingly separated by race, income, and economic opportunity."

How ironic that in the very time frame when the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, and South Africa's apartheid were being dismantled, nearly 10 million Americans should decide to move into walled medieval enclaves replete with gates and private security forces. Perhaps Checkpoint Charlie is not gone after all.

And what about the people and places left behind in this exodus to suburbia or the enclaves of gated America? Political economist Paul Jargowski notes in Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City (Russell Sage, 1997) that the number of poor people living in high-poverty neighborhoods nearly doubled between 1970 and 1990, and the poor in American cities are increasingly entrapped in racially segregated neighborhoods. Jargowski reports, "In all, there are nearly 3,000 (up from about 1,200) high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States with about 8.5 million residents.

"Black ghettos are the most common type and account for about half of all the high-poverty neighborhoods and 42 percent of their residents." Furthermore, "Most whites, blacks, and Hispanics residing in high-poverty neighborhoods live where their own group is dominant--white slums, ghettos, or barrios, respectively."

And just what is life like in these areas of our cities? Jargowski offers a decidedly prosaic description.

"In our fieldwork, we found that such neighborhoods (with poverty rates of 40 percent and above) were predominantly minority. They tended to have a threatening appearance, marked by dilapidated housing, vacant units with broken or boarded-up windows, abandoned and burned-out cars, and men hanging out on street corners. In Philadelphia and Chicago the housing stock consisted of high-rise public housing projects or multistory tenement buildings built right to the sidewalks.

"In Detroit, the high-poverty areas consisted of single-family homes built decades ago for auto workers earning the unheard of wage of $5 a day; now old and undermaintained, some had simply fallen down and only rubble remained. In Jackson, Mississippi, such neighborhoods had tin-roofed shacks. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, trailers sat rusting alongside tiny Depression-era houses."

The picture Jargowski paints in his research is not pretty. He argues that "our nation is (still) moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal," and that this deepening chasm poses what may be the most serious threat to the survival of our society. We are, in Jargowski's opinion, living in increasingly separate and unequal worlds, sharing less and less common ground.

Another particularly nasty sign of our growing separateness is to be found in the fact that America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons and jails, and that the vast majority of recruits for America's burgeoning prison industrial complex are being drawn from the wasteland of Jargowski's high-poverty neighborhoods. As Vincent Reiser reports in "Jailing for Dollars," a piece he wrote for The New Leader, "Owing to massive increases in drug arrests and `three strikes and you're out' mandatory sentencing laws, the number of people confined in local, state, and federal correctional institutions has more than tripled since 1980 to over 1.6 million people today."

Indeed, prisons have become the growth industry of the era, with an annual budget in excess of $26 billion, and an incarceration rate two to five times higher than that of our European neighbors. And as Kenneth Adams notes in "The Bull Market in Corrections," a recent essay in Prison Journal, "In 1995 the prison population set another record increase: 90,000 new inmates, translating into 1,725 new prison beds a week ... (and) forecasts indicate that by the year 2000, the prison population will increase again by half, putting the total population in the neighborhood of 2.25 million inmates." This is in spite of the fact that the crime rates in the United States were about the same in 1980 and 1993, and that overwhelming evidence that tough prison penalties have little effect on violent criminal behavior.

What is even more disturbing is Michael Tonry's contention that the people being crammed into the rapidly expanding, overcrowded, and increasingly violent and dangerous space of our prisons and jails are inner-city poor and minorities. In Malign Neglect (Oxford University Press, 1995), he argues that even though the crime rate among black males has remained stable for more than a decade, "disproportionate punishments of blacks, however, have been getting worse. Since 1980, the number of blacks in prison has tripled ... (and) between 1979 and 1992, the percentage of blacks among those admitted to state and federal prisons grew from 39 to 54 percent."

In The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Fortress Press, 1993), Sallie McFague argues that space and a sense of place are absolutely essential for every life-form on this planet, and that finding our place or niche in the world is a fundamental task of all of us. French philosopher Simone Weil made the same point when she noted that "to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."

Christian theology has sometimes lost touch with that need to feel at home in God's creation. The sojourner mentality, stressing our identity as pilgrims on the way to another, more spiritual realm has often enough allowed us to treat our home with less reverence and regard than it deserves. So, too, our secular concern with wealth and consumption has led many Americans and other Westerners to see the wonders and wilderness of creation as untapped capital or property. Recovering a sense of the sacredness of place begins with understanding what it means to have and care about a home, one that is much larger and livelier than a house.

But, as McFague also points out, sacred space is shared space. Maybe that's why early Christian churches, unlike the Roman and Greek temples of the day, weren't built to house just a single statue or votive lamp but to hold whole communities. After all, it's our ability to learn to share the space we live in and to live together justly and harmoniously in these shared spaces that make them sacred. This is true whether we are speaking about sharing this space with other species or with our neighbor, a word that means to live in a shared space with someone.

By Patrick McCormick, an assistant professor of ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.