Most lunch times I find myself lured into St Patrick’s Cathedral, a short walk from where I work in Little Collins Street in downtown Melbourne. I ford streams of office workers, scramble through the noise and turbulence of the city and enter through St Pat’s large and impressive wooden doors.
It’s the silence that draws me there, a deep and magnetic emptiness that satisfies my need to find a place of quiet reflection in the midst of the city crowds and the feverishness of my own thoughts. It’s a giant cavern and I welcome the opportunity to just sit with myself and be enveloped in its heavy, reverential air.
I don’t belong to any organised religion, so it’s fascinating and novel to be in such an impressive spiritual place. I come from a family of non-observant Ukrainian Jews and as I sit in the cathedral I perform a simple Zen meditation of observing the flow of my breath. Despite my heathenness, I carry the same respect for the divinity of the place that I see in the faces of the few people worshipping there.
Everything about St Pat’s – its massive stone pillars, its lofty roof, the altars and stained glass windows - speaks of the immensity of God and the spiritual calling. Everything is pointing upwards, from the material world to the transcendent and everlasting beyond. The individual is made small and humbled, submitting the ego in the all-powerful womb of the divine. From the windows streams a yellow light that germinates the dark interior, a soft grace that falls into a deep well of silence.
Entering the cathedral I am compelled to answer the call of Spirit, and everything around me is telling me that is what I should do, is designed for that purpose. There is something deeply attractive about the silence in this place. It is like the sense of awe one feels staring at a mountain or looking down into a forested valley from the top of an escarpment. Like dropping into a well and being held by the nothingness that is there.
After my little meditation sessions in St Pat’s, as I walk the short way back to work, I’m always struck by the contrast with the outside world. I wonder how the experience of the sacred can make its way out of the wooden doors and into everyday life; not clothed in the old and outworn forms of religion, but in some shape that is alive and relevant.
Religion built a vessel for the Spirit, allowing people a conscious relationship to the transcendental forces at work in their lives and in the world. In modern society we have not eliminated the spiritual journey, but simply driven it into the unconscious. As the Jungian critic David Tacey says in Gods and Diseases (HarperCollins, 2011): “The spirit still pushes us from one state to another, and nothing can stand in its way, not even a materialist society that has no belief in the sacred.”
There is hope. It comes in the form of the quiet moments when we connect with the deep silence beyond life’s myriad distractions; the moments in which we can simply be. It happens in nature and in loving relationships; in times of celebration and sharing with others; in music and dance; and, though we usually don’t seek it in this way, in times of suffering.
Sacred ritual doesn’t belong solely inside a place of worship. Outside the cathedral is where the challenge, and the fun, begins.
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