Downtown Vancouver © Jason M. Brown (click to enlarge image)

This image spoke to me of shared sacred spaces in a very secular city like Vancouver. We see a historic church in the downtown core. The churches used to be the highest buildings around, now they are dwarfed by corporate offices and hotels. In a world that is suffering from equal parts crisis of meaning and ecological crisis, where corporate offices are full and churches are empty, we seem not to know how to dwell in shared sacred spaces. We spend our lives between home, work and the pub. We are skeptical of ideologies, and yet many fall under the sway of conspiracy theories, often through the marginal non-spaces of the internet. To share in something sacred it seems is increasingly out of reach for young, single, upwardly mobile people living in Vancouver. Churches signify a stereotyped Christian unwelcomeness to progressive views; but simultaneously a deep longing for connection and the sacred.

Mountain View Cemetery holds a Night for All Souls every year around Nov. 1. People come and write the names of loved ones they have lost. There are shrines, incense and candles. This shrine is a tryptic in which people can write the names of those who have passed this year. At the end of the short festival, it will be burned in a pyre. The prayer flags and other elements are reminiscent of religious observances, but no specific religion’s symbols are being employed here. The organizers are fiercely non-sectarian, and the space feels almost religiously non-religious. It is a space for secular and post-religious people to explore rituals of death and dying without any of the religious metaphysics they may have grown up with; the stories of afterlife and salvation they were threatened with. There is a strong sense that the organizers want folks to connect with the idea that death is natural, final. That grief must be engaged and healed rather than worked through after losing a loved one, rather than ignored by ‘keeping busy’ as we often hear after someone has lost a loved one.

Mountain View Cemetery © Jason M. Brown (click to enlarge image)

Shrine to the Virgin Mary at St. James Cathedral in Seattle © Jason M. Brown (click to enlarge image)

This is a public shrine to the Virgin Mary at St. James Cathedral in Seattle where people come to venerate her. This area was vandalized shortly after I took this picture. In observing the space, it was clear that many came into the shrine out of pure curiosity. As this woman was in prayer, many came and simply stood around and watched. Looked around. Snapped a picture. A clearly sectarian space that seemed to draw in people from the outside. The candles, flowers and prayers of thousands of people, Catholic and not, echoing and seeping from the walls, and wafting like incense.

Monks of Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Carlton, OR celebrate Holy Saturday Vigil at a midnight mass. The community is increasingly elderly, but they have several younger recruits. People of all faiths, but mostly Catholics, come from all over the valley to participate in this sacred ceremony. The monastery also hosts monastic immersion experiences where young men can experience monastic life, even if they do not intend to become monks themselves. Having participated in this month long immersion, the first thing I noticed was how fluid the monks were in their movements between the spaces. When the space becomes shared with guests, one’s body must learn how to inhabit the monastic space. The monks are always kind and helpful. Showing you which page in the psalms to turn for chanting, where to bow to the altar, where to go for work hours.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Carlton, OR © Jason M. Brown (click to enlarge image)

Jason M. Brown is a lecturer in the humanities and environmental studies at Simon Fraser University. For more information on Jason's teaching, writing and photography, see holyscapes.org.