Jackie Stallworth - Landscapes of the Sacred 1

 Chapter 1

The thing that stood out to me most in this chapter was the mention of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the town in Wales. I’ve actually been to this town, a few years ago when my family and I took a trip to Wales. We did a bus excursion (so I guess you could say we were bus tourists), and we passed through that town and did a quick stop. While I still cannot pronounce it, I will never forget the tour guide playing a song with the lyrics teaching you how to pronounce it. I also didn’t realize that the “Llan” meant a holy place or church because I remember reading it and seeing it all the time in Wales, but I never realized. There are hundreds of towns in wales that start with “Llan”, so I know now, they all must be sacred somehow.

I noticed that in this chapter, as well as other parts of this book, there were a lot of “a sacred is this” and “a sacred place is that”. I’ve always believed that sacred places are sacred just because they are, but it seems like there are a lot of rules and criteria for a sacred place to be a sacred place. I feel like the need for a sacred place to have these sorts of requirements defeats the purpose of it being sacred if that makes sense. And I know that Lane is an expert on this kind of stuff and I am far from one, but those are just my thoughts.

For me, the biggest takeaway from this is the claim that “a sacred place is a storied place” because I think that’s probably what everyone thinks of when they hear that phrase “this place is sacred…” 

Also, something that I found interesting was on page 21, when Lane says, “... the place is never ‘chosen’ by man… it is merely discovered by him…” Maybe I’m trying to come at this from a non-biblical standpoint, and this is a little difficult for me to word, but I feel like this all depends on what sacred means. I think different people define sacred in different ways, and the different definitions would determine whether or not it follows the axioms.

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