I’m writing this at noon on Thanksgiving Day while sitting in a rocking chair at the Cracker Barrel off Bowen Street in Arlington, listening to the sleet bounce off nearby car windows across the parking lot. It doesn’t feel cold enough to me, but the presence of sleet is undeniable.
For our family, this is part two of a three-part holiday tradition – not exactly Norman Rockwell, but I’m sure something Norman would paint if he were around today. Part one of the tradition happened earlier this morning when we went to downtown Dallas at 9:00 AM (actually, we got their about 8:00 AM to find a close parking place) to run the 40th-Annual Dallas YMCA Turkey Trot 8-mile and 3-mile road race with over 28,000 of our closest running friends.
Part three of the tradition will be an evening movie, yet to be determined. It will probably be Fred Claus.
Part two, Thanksgiving dinner at Cracker Barrel, turned out to be a popular choice for many families. Even in this cold weather the parking lot is full and the restaurant is full and the rocking chairs are full and we have a 50-minute wait for a table. Apparently, cooking a big turkey dinner at home isn’t as obligatory as it once was. I’ll order a chicken-fried steak with corn and green beans and apples and corn bread; I don’t want the restaurant to run out of turkey and dressing for all the people who want that sort of thing – people like Cyndi.
But what I really enjoy is doing the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning, tradition part one. The Trot is a huge crowd and very congested, especially after the race is over and everyone is pushing through the lines to get yogurt and water and bananas and Starbucks. Unlike other crowds I’ve been in, this one is energizing. Everyone is wearing race T-shirts and fleece and gloves and hats and earmuffs and warm tights and running shoes and everyone is happy to be running and we are all happy to be one of us. Being “one of us” is a powerful motivator, even for lonely long-distance runners.
The race field is so big it stretches for blocks down Young Street, even before the start. In fact, it took me six minutes after the starting fun fired to shuffle my way up to the actual start line. It took another two minutes before I could break out of my walk and into a slow jog. I was twenty minutes into the race before I could actually engage in open-field running.
Ironically, on Tuesday before we drove to Dallas I received my copy of U S News and World Report in the mail, and the cover story was “Sacred Spaces: Inside the world’s most spiritually important places and what they mean today.” It was ironic because running the Turkey Trot has always been more of a soulful experience for me than an actual sporting event. But I hesitate to call it a sacred place, or sacred space, because it is only, after all, a running event, not church. The magazine article defined sacred places as “outward and visible signs of an invisible order … part of the human effort to define the cosmos, to name the divinity, and to locate the self and the community within it.”
So much of my experience with God has been tied to physical movement in one way or another – running or walking or hiking or backpacking or lifting weights – and at least for me, so much of it has been internal and introspective when I am alone with God even in the middle of a huge crowd. I think Christians in general have overlooked the physical aspect of worship for too long; but as I get older, I find myself becoming more mystical and more physical in my communion with God.
So it isn’t such a big stretch to expect spiritual insight, or at least, spiritual closeness, in the middle of a big physical event like a 28,000-person road race when I am alone and isolated as an individual runner even among so many others.
For me, a sacred place is any place that puts my mind and heart and soul in a place where I’m ready to hear from God. I’ve learned from past experiences the places where it will probably happen again, and it may be that very sense of anticipation and expectation that makes the place sacred. If I plan on being close to God, I probably will be. It is the anticipation that opens my heart and my ears.
For me, it also matters whether I’m a participant or a spectator. I may enjoy watching a football game with 50,000 other rabid college fans, but it doesn’t speak to my heart like running with them. In need to participate. Moving down the road in a large crowd of similarly-minded people in self-propelled physical effort is a formula for sacred space in my book.
