Landscapes of the Sacred - Blog #3

In Belden C. Lane’s book, Landscapes of the Sacred, he discusses three different approaches to understanding the medicine wheel as a sacred place. I would like to take one of those approaches and apply them to my understanding of a sacred place before and after the reading.  The ontological approach is the prospective for which a sacred place becomes sacred because supernatural and magical forces have taken over an ordinary place and made it into something. This parallels to Lane’s second axiom of categorizing sacred places where he sates that the ordinary becomes extraordinary by the rituals done there. Therefore, the presence of a sacred place through this approach can ever really be seen through one lens, it is the lens through which the pilgrim looks that he interprets reality and places value on a space based on his or her faith or beliefs. Before the reading I would have never thought to categorize a scared place in this way. Often I only associated places like this that had hundreds of years of history or ancestry. To me scared places were always marked by a building or important person. After the reading, I have already changed my understanding of a scared place. Since I don’t feel I have specifically entered a scared place growing up, such as church or some belief or ritual my parents held, I now understand a scared place can be one of my own.