Sacred time happens for me when I dine alone.
Certainly, that's not an exclusive statement; sacred times occur on other occasions for me. But there is no time so full of God's presence as when I am able to dine alone with a book. It helps if the music is forgettable--it almost always is, whether it's New Age vibrations or alternative whines. It's better if the restaurant is locally owned and cheap. I prefer Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese--nothing beats a pho shop--although large, commercial burrito chains can do in a pinch. Eating spicy soup, grateful for my existence, talking in my head to the characters and writers through the page, enjoying the restful silence of the brain so often denied us in the loud, loud West. This is holy time, sacramental time. The shoulders ease, time changes texture, and silence seems mingled with the sound.
And I'm not alone. Today, I saw four or five other people, outrageously doing nothing: eating, reading, staring into the distance, solitary in the crowd. It was oddly like being in church.
Traditionally, in the history of the faith, meals are festive and sacred occasions for the community. Eucharist is a ritualized community meal as well as a sacrament. Agape and Seder meals happen in families and communities. Meals are shared affairs, and sacred meals are especially shared. Or at least, they happen only with others.
But in our own time, I wonder about the need for solitude. Thomas Merton doubts that true solitude is possible in a city--he thinks solitude is replaced with loneliness and alienation. Maybe there's something to Merton's comment, but mostly, it sounds like good old fashioned aesthetic preference inflated to ontological status. He didn't like cities and they didn't work for him, and so he extrapolated that, therefore, cities must be bad. Solitude is as accessible in cities as elsewhere--even the suburbs have solitude. It's a matter of temperament.
Even more, many people lament the loss of communal meals, with more dining alone, as one symptom of our alienating culture. There's something to that critique. But for me, well, I like dining alone as well as with others. It speaks to me.
But what about sacred meals alone? Are they sacred because tacitly they embrace a broader communion, one with all the saints, and in fact, while sitting alone, we are dining with God, writers, literary characters, and other presences that make it a kind of silent community? Or, are they sacred because of their "solitude in company"? Are they made profound by the silence in the midst of others, tables empty and full? I'm more inclined to think of it in terms of solitude, that sacred space is more than a designated area.
Perhaps sacred space would best be understood as that space, in time and physical space, which frees us to be ourselves.
