We  have all had the experience of being somewhere that has a special overtone, a location where we have contentment and a sense of peace. It may be due to the location itself, our mood at the time or the company we are with.  

They are places that we remember for many years, so deeply have we been ingrained by the atmosphere we found there and our response to it. There is a wish to return to them to recapture what we once knew there.  

Thomas Merton had such an experience only a few days before his sudden death in 1968.  He visited the valley of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka . His description of that occasion in the 7^th volume of his diaries (The other side of the Mountain) is eloquent.

When confronted by the huge figures of resting Buddhas he writes:  

“Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious…I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass and wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces.”  

In spite of suggestions to the contrary, Merton was a Christian monk and remained so. But he was sensitive to other faiths and recognised the integrity of those who followed them.  

So many of the early writers in the Christian Communities talk of a place apart, of somewhere that is consecrated in their own lives to prayer and time with God.  Origen tells us that:  

“As for the place you should realise that every place is suitable for prayer. However, in order to pray undisturbed it is possible to choose a particular place, in one’s own house, if practicable, as a kind of hallowed spot, and to pray there”.  

And in fact, we need go no further than Mark’s Gospel where in the first chapter we hear that: 2

 “In the morning, long before Dawn He got up and left the house and went off to a lonely place and prayed there”  

For this very reason, we should take great care with our own ‘holy places’, be they public within our community or within the privacy of our own homes. The image, the crucifix, the icon, the candle that help locate such a place, become tokens of our presence where we can listen to the Lord and enter into his peace.

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