When studying for the 2006 U.S.A. Memory Championship, journalist and mnemonics enthusiast Joshua Foer utilized a bizarrely simple technique taught to him by his mentor, Ed Cooke, in order to win it all. Foer explains in his book Moonwalking with Einstein that all human beings have an incredible memory for space and that memory champions throughout the ages (apparently these sort of things have been going on for some time…) have used familiar spaces to help remember sequences of cards, numbers, or otherwise.

Think of a place like your childhood home, Foer suggests, and mentally assign sequences to different rooms as you walk around. Try your route to work. Try thinking through the places that you have been today. In each case, most of us can remember very specific details about the places we have been. I believe this ability to conciously or unconsciously process place has fascinating implications for us as faith and interfaith leaders, implications that my faith community, Fourth Presbyterian Church, is trying to understand right now.

Fourth Presbyterian Church is in the midst of building a 5-story addition to the west portion of their building. A prominent piece of this new building will be a new 300 seat chapel named after our current pastor, John Buchanan, and at a recent pastoral staff meeting the prospective design of the chapel was shown to the group.

The design featured a great deal of natural light and, intriguingly, a large number of crosses (over 300)carved into the wall. There were plenty of other features (a labyrinth, stained glass, and numerous light lines representing important days in the Christian calendar), but the crosses dominated the discussion. One member of our staff expressed disappointment over having the crosses in the chapel because, in particular, this was going to be a place where a lot of interfaith weddings and possibly interfaith worship services would occur.

The response from the group was predictable: this is a Christian church and therefore the chapel should look like a Christian chapel. I tend to agree with this – if in large part because the interfaith chapels that I’ve seen at hospitals tend to be so devoid of symbols that they lose their ability to be sacred to the safety of sterility. I also agree that reducing the symbolism of our own faith space in a sort of “lowest common denominator” approach is not honest or hospitable to any of our guests of other faiths. We cannot hide who we are and expect to receive others’ religious integrity in return.

However, there was a part of the staff member’s argument for removing the crosses that I haven’t been able to shake. While we may feel perfectly comfortable as a member of the privileged Christian majority in observing a Torah scroll in a synagogue or an ablution area in a mosque, there is a particular history with the cross as a symbol of aggression, hostility, and forced conversion amongst other religious populations. If human beings are really as sensitive to space as Foer and other mnemonists suggest, then the dominant takeway from being within a space like the chapel that Fourth has designed is this loaded symbol of the cross. Is this truly appropriate for an interfaith service? And, honestly, what is the alternative? Is there such a thing as a non-sterile, interfaith sacred space?

I don’t want to limit responses to this question, but I’ll offer my quick thoughts: There is such a thing as interfaith sacred space, but it involves history and mutuality… in order words, a non-sterile, interfaith sacred space is not born overnight. It involves shared experiences – perhaps an annual service or wedding – and it involves a willingness to spend time in one another’s sacred space. This Fall and Winter, The Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions and Sacred Spaces International teamed up to create shared space by arranging monthly visits to one another’s houses of worship. It is there that the history and mutuality are born and our spaces can become sacred to one another.

So, what do you think? Is there such a thing as a non-sterile, interfaith sacred space? What does that look like to you?

This image is in the public domain and was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.