African Insights Ezine - August 2005

Sacred Spaces, Thought provoking Places

As a child I loved being around people, but I also enjoyed being alone. I lived in a small town in Germany, surrounded by hills, two rivers flowing through it and an ancient castle standing tall and solid like a sentry watching over it all. I lived in a house on a street dating back to the 12th Century, so I was surrounded by places that had meaning and history.

My grandmother understood the significance of places and their sacredness. I would often walk with her to the cemetery to water the flowers and tend the graves of different relatives who had passed on. At times we would sit there in the evening light, not saying a word, but one felt something within. It was there as a young boy I learned about sacred spaces and thought provoking places.

Verdun, France-- a place etched into the minds of several German and French generations alike; a place where I lived for two years during my youth. It was during the years of my life when I searched for interior castles, not just those on the hills around me. Verdun was a place where I once again recognized sacred spaces that provoked me to ponder inwardly what I saw outwardly.

It was there I began to take photographs of the fields of battle up in the hills where 700,000 men lost their lives. Even today the hills around Verdun look like craters of the moon. I had a personal connection to this place; my grandfather had spent several years in Verdun. He told me stories of his time there, told me of the horrors of war and brought home to me as boy the finality of death.

I stood on top of one of those hills, all around me were white crosses and a few Stars of David. Behind me was the ossuary, final resting place for the bones of 130,000 unknown soldiers. I peered down into that basement burial ground and saw the masses of skeletal remains--an eerie sight, yet peaceful. As I looked around snow began to fall, silently cover everything in a blanket of white. The wind began to blow and my heart was strangely touched. Once again, I recognized Verdun to be a sacred, thought provoking place. As in the town of my youth, there was a presence, a sense that something had taken place there beyond comprehension, that those were hallowed grounds.

It was early in the morning, the sun had risen over Kigali, Rwanda. It was in the fall of 1994, a few months after the genocide that took almost a million lives. I stood on the balcony of Hotel des Mille Collines--you may call it Hotel Rwanda, after the film. It was still quiet, the hotel staff setting tables for breakfast, one guest doing laps in the swimming pool, but otherwise it appeared quiet and pristine.

I ventured down to breakfast and sat at a table out in the gardens. There I enjoyed a great coffee and a perfect breakfast in the gardens of the Hotel of a Thousand Hills; everything so perfect, so colorful, soft music reaching my ears. It could not have been any better than that.

As a waiter approached me with more coffee, I asked him if he had been there during "those days." He nodded and softly began to speak in English about "those days," when the Mille Collines became like an Old Testament city of refuge where the Avenger of Death could not penetrate, where brave men and women of principle stood up against all odds, and goodness triumphed over evil.

I sat there reflecting on all that I had heard. I thought about this place, filled with people who had the sentence of death over them. And, once again, I sensed that there was another sacred place, a place where life triumphed over death in spite of all odds! All around us people had spent months trying to survive. Where I was having breakfast, they had shared their hopes and fears. My room provided shelter for a family, the restaurant overlooking Kigali where I had eaten the night before was the place where people had shared their happiness that they had made it through the night.

I have visited the Hotel des Mille Collines many times and always felt that special something, that touch of grace, the feeling of presence that here was a sacred space, where people took refuge and felt safe.

In contrast, I visited other places in Rwanda that were considered shelters of safety, places like churches and hospitals, only to see them only as places of death and hopelessness, of betrayal and hatred.

I often stayed just outside of Kigali in a home owned by a well-to-do Rwandan family. The mother was in Belgium when the genocide started, the children at their home in Rwanda. The very room were I used to sleep was riddled with bullet holes, and where one of the daughters lost her life during those terrible 100 Days. I would often sit there with my journal and weep--not knowing why-- but now I understand why. I was in a sacred place that moved me to tears and filled my heart with pain when I thought about what had taken place in that house--another sacred space.

The African man and woman understand the sacred nature of places. To get a sense of this, all one has to do is to sit quietly in Ngong hills and watch the wind move the trees below, look down the Rift Valley as far as the eye can see. Sit by the River Nile and sense it is a river of life, flowing ever toward the Mediterranean Sea.

At the end of the day, most Africans want to be buried in a sacred place, near their family, near home. I know a woman living in North America who told me that if she got married she would have her husband-to-be sign a pre-nuptial that she would be buried in her homeland surrounded by her family and clan.

Once when I lived in Africa, I visited the grandmother of one of my friends. I was served Lira Lira, a local beverage, putting fire into my belly, and then she took me outside to the place where her family who had gone before were buried. She quietly stood there and touched one of the graves and solemnly said, "This is my son who is no longer with us, but he is still with us." I understood. Like my own grandmother, she felt that grave as a sacred place where memories could flow freely and one could come to sense, to know.

It is good to know there are still many such sacred spaces, thought-provoking places in our world ..…jon...Visit Africa: You will never be the same!