Setting: Sitting Bull and Sacred Places

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome.  May you be happy and safe this day.

I have been writing about God in light of the elements of storytelling: character, setting, conflict, plot, and theme.  My last few posts have been about character.  I would like to consider setting.

In his fascinating book, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade writes about sacred space.  It is the place where people encounter the numinous, which is a technical term in religious studies that points to an experience of the divine or a sense of transcendence attributed to a god.  

Once the divine has been encountered there, that place becomes sacred for that person.  If he is a Moses, Mohammed, or a Siddhartha then the sacred place becomes the subject of lore.  Its numinosity spreads from a village, to a race of people, a nation, a planet.

The sacred place is often given a name, like Beth-el which means “house of god,” and a sacred pillar or altar is erected there to mark that place.  This is uncommonly common within all human civilizations, ancient and modern.

Many times, people experience the divine through a vision.  Often, the place is a high place like a mountain or a hill. 

Eliade says that the sacred can break through anywhere and at any time.  When the sacred happens, the place and the time can become holy for the one who experiences the divine.

I wonder if such experiences are so peculiar that a man or woman senses a special manifestation of their god. 

Setting in a story is as important as setting in battle, a sporting event, or a date.  Setting often determines the action of a story or it influences the action in a singular way.

Read the story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, and you will see how an island makes a story happen in a powerful and fascinating way for a hunter marooned there. 

There’s a sacred story about Sitting Bull that depends greatly on time and place.  Some white men who are landscaping around Lakota ground begin shooting their rifles at Sitting Bull and his friends who show up to investigate their activities.

Sitting Bull invites his friends to sit with him and smoke a pipe.  As the white men fire their rifles, Sitting Bull and his friends walk toward them and sit.  They begin to smoke a pipe as bullets hit the ground and whiz around them.

According to the story, Sitting Bull finished his pipe.  Slowly, he bumped it on a rock to loosen the ashes.  He picked up a twig and took his time cleaning out the pipe before he stood up and walked back to a safe distance.  All the other Lakota there marveled at his courage and his spiritual strength. 

The setting is the sacred place that is the land belonging to the Lakota people.  This story could happen in Neyland Stadium or the moon, but the characters and motivation must change.  The sense of what happened could not be replicated in the spiritual way with the spiritual meaning that this story communicates on Lakota soil. 

The Bible has many settings with such profound, spiritual stories.  Next time, I will write about a few.

Blessings…