Episode 307 - Sacred Space

About this Episode

It's a kind of personal discovery I made last week, when inventorying some more of the songs featured in Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers (Mockingbird, 2020).

The discovery was that each song not only connects me with a person and/or connection with that person -- or disconnection from the person; but that each song connotes a place, an actual place. In other words, take "Reelin' in the Years", by Steely Dan. It's not just Mrs. Zahl, in a long ago springtime in Boston, with whom the song emotionally connects me. But it's a place there, i.e., Memorial Drive in Cambridge, down which she would drive her car fast, with me in it, and the radio would play ... "Reelin' in the Years".

My and your emotional, heart experiences are connected not just to a person, but to a place where we were with that person.

An analogy is in the experience of Christian pilgrimage. Why did certain places, such as St. Juan de Compostela or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or Iona or Lourdes, become the objects of pilgrimage? Because someone very special was there once, and did something special while he or she was there. The power of that experience, which took place there within a moment in time, draws other people to the place. It is not the place as such which draws you. Rather, it is the connection of a healing, hopeful personality with the place which draws you.

Like "Reelin' in the Years"!

I hope you like Petula Clark. She knew a place once, too, in 1965. And she sang a touching love song two years later, in 1967, entitled "Don't Sleep in the Subway". Gosh, and I remember exactly where I was when I first received her kind and tender message. LUV U!