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.
In the Sahara one day, I climbed over a dune to descend into a deep bowl of sand. Sitting at the bottom I encountered for the first time absolute silence, stillness that is indivisible. For there are two silences: a silence can be no more than the absence of noise, it can be inert; or, at the other end of the scale, there is a nothingness that is infinitely alive, and every cell of the body can be penetrated and vivified by this second silence's activity.