Heart of the Matter

The heart board of the Temenos Center for Art & Spirit gathered for the first time this week. It’s really just my closest friends and collaborators, the few souls in the world in whose hands I could leave my heart. And I wrote up an agenda like one is supposed to before such a meeting, and we left it behind entirely, strayed after ideas, inspirations, art, ethos, the heart of the matter which I had nearly forgotten through all the preparations web and logo and url design.

This group is a collection of devotions, a healer, a poet, a voice, a chef, a choreographer. Rabbi James Goodman, the elder amongst us shared the story of a mythical ark, first constructed in the 1700’s for a wooden polish synagogue, buried in the earth in the days of the Nazis, shipped across the ocean, abandoned on a wharf, eventually acquired by a seminary. And though it was left in a storage room it had a magnetism of its own, and all the students gathered around that ark in the cellar to pray. 

A temenos is the periphery around a sanctuary which contains and protects the transformative energy of the ceremony within. For Carl Jung a temenos was the container for dreams, the circle circumscribed by the dreamer which allowed them to confront the depths of their dark and the ecstasies of their light. For me temenos is a reminder the temple is everywhere, or, it is everywhere that you build it. The significance of the first step in any creative act is profound, the nod to the heavens, the blessing before tasting ripe summer fruit, before smelling a rose, the homage to the maker of life, please let the magic rain down all over this thing … if god wills it. The first act establishes the temenos, everything else follows accordingly.

I have spent the last month researching the archetypes of sacred space and metaphors for inhabitance, but until Jimi told us that story, I was missing the most crucial element. The center of the temple is of course significant. Often something elemental is placed there, a flame, a fountain, a stone, a Calder mobile which is really a prayer of gratitude to the wind. Or that space is filled with emptiness, making room for the spirit of God and all those who come to pray. Lost in the majesty of the images of physical temples, I had forgotten the dynamic force at the center, the mystery which draws us toward it. 

We are kin of spirit because we are drawn to serve around the same placeless altar. We are drawn to gather around the creation of works of art, wisdom and culture of aesthetic excellence and spiritual depth. Where the lineages and traditions of our ancestors are gifted to the world. Where the transcendent nobility of every human being goes unquestioned.  Where mourning, vulnerability, and self-inquiry are the stepping stones of spiritual growth and cultural healing.

Make for yourself an ark … come build with me.

Rabbi Zach Fredman