Sacred Space.

By Helen Watson White in Sermons

creating places of peace...

While the practice of removing your shoes as a
sign of respect is common to many Asian and
Pacific cultures, it can also mean simply that
the house-owners put a value on the quality of
their flooring materials.
This might be because they are rich, and paid
top dollar for carpets, or because they are poor
and need to conserve what they've got, unable
to afford the replacement cost.
For us, it's almost stopped being an issue, because for 40 years, we've
been gardeners who sometimes came inside, rather than residents who
make excursions outdoors. It's called indoor/outdoor flow.
In complete contrast, my Japanese family maintains the custom that
'Inside' is not just a rented living space, it's more (my son feels, after 20
years) like a bedroom, the whole house is a bedroom: clean, private, calm,
beautifully intimate and somehow sacrosanct. I've learned to respect that,
because sharing this reverence is the closest thing to sharing their family
essence, their spirituality, as the foreigner I am.
The collection of shoes in the picture is not from the doorstep of an open
home – although I've seen many such configurations – but from a very
specific occasion two years ago: the 21st Peace Lecture at Araiteuru
Marae. As this year's Peace Lecture is promised for the day after our
Mornington anniversary celebrations, I wanted to highlight it, in case it
gets lost in our crowded calendar.
The annual event dates from the early 2000s, when the Dunedin
Abrahamic Interfaith Group (DAIG) was formed in response to 9/11 in
New York. At that time, it seems the whole of Western society was
corralled into an ideological enclosure – similar and indeed related to the
modern secular state of Israel – to be educated into naming all Muslims as
the enemy, and their home countries as Terrorist-factories. The 'War
against Terror' began to play out in London and the UK, where we were
based in September 2011, and indeed as far away as the Otago University
campus, where Muslim and other faith groups felt apprehensive about
the position imposed upon them in the newly mythologized world 'order'.
The University Chaplaincy, called upon to address related individual and
group anxieties, joined with the DAIG to create the lecture series, inviting
different faith and political leaders to continue prioritizing the cause of
international peace. All previous lectures remain available on the DAIG
website, providing an unparalleled resource of peaceful views, turning the
discussion around from crisis to communal positivity.
While most of the lectures have been held in University theatres, large or
small, the event at Araiteuru Marae had the unique grounding of being
held on a revered Maori (multi-tribal and multicultural) site. The history of
the complex includes a racially motivated arson attack, which burned
down a beloved wharenui/meeting house, as I found when editing the
posthumously published Dunedin Churches Past and Present, by Charles
Croot (1999). I was able to source photos from the Pene family that bore
the signs of the fire in their blackened edges.
It is now a joy to enter both the warm, busy whare kai/dining room and
the beautiful wharenui (meeting house) in view of this painful memory,
and the act of renewal that followed.
The pictured shoes are from the entrance to the rebuilt wharenui, shoes
having been removed along with the dust of 'Outside', representing Tu,
the god of war, because when you enter what might be called the
sanctuary – for it is very like a church – you enter the domain of Rongo,
god of Peace.
At no. 24 Shetland St, the street I grew up on, and went to both school
and church, this is an open and deeply inclusive place, where food is
shared together with stories, laughter, art and korero/talk. Tears were also
shared, for the passion and agony of victims –whether Māori, Jewish,
Muslim or Christian – when we gathered on sacred ground to talk about
the future of Peace.