We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes... Our homesickness is alleviated only by love, the love that transcends our self-centeredness, our pettiness... When we are truly in love, not in the sense of romantic, erotic love, but in the sense of God's love for all that the Power of Love created, then our homesickness is alleviated. When we are in love we are no longer homesick, for Love is home.
There were many places I now know to have had for me the quality we call sacred. Those places were no more and no less than places where for some reason one longed to be, where one had certain feelings that varied from fearfulness to strange and undefined joy. The adult I now am has learned to speak and to write of something called "sacred space," but, as with so many sacred things, one possessed them as a child long before one could name them. Come to think of it, the same may be true of all elements of God's grace.