On St Andrew’s Day 2003, during a simple meditation, woven around the music of the clarsach, representatives of different faiths and philosophies placed gifts to resource the hospital Sanctuary for reflection and prayer.
The space was dedicated by all saying together the text shown here: –
“May this place, which we now dedicate by our presence, our prayers and our best hopes, be that ‘other’ place – amidst busy wards, stressful days, demanding and complex care, the unexpected and unforeseen, the best and worst that life can bring- a place where people may be themselves and… find sanctuary. and find … Sanctuary…”
The need from time to time to find sanctuary is a thread consistently woven into the complex tapestry of human being. Its two colours have not faded, although they are as old as the idea of sanctuary itself, emerging from the mists of ancient beliefs and religious practice. The first represents the deep enduring human need to find room within or to reach out beyond to that which is ‘other’ or ‘transcendent’ or ‘holy’, hence the heart music – ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus’ – which although played on a whole variety of different instruments, resonates across so many belief systems.
From under the shade of sacred trees, to huge temples of faith, to bare bracken hillsides, people have gone to encounter the holy, not so much because of what the place itself is, but rather because of what it represents, what it invites, what it makes room for. Sanctuaries emerged as widely varying places in widely varying cultures, once very much monocultures separated more by time, distance, history and language than is the case in the early years of the twenty first century. Now new Sanctuaries are beginning to be created for the public institutions of a multicultural society; Sanctuaries, in which sign and symbol invite and include, in which quality of being rather than fever of doing is valued and where that which is holy, transcendent or other still finds space, even in an increasingly secular society.
Finding Sanctuary is also about making it to a place of safety, away from that which threatens to challenge and undermine our security, or even our very existence. For so long a legal right in many societies for people in fear of their lives, it remains an inner imperative, a right of the human spirit to find room to work out fundamental human needs such as those which are so familiar to the community of patients, staff, volunteers and visitors in a large acute-care hospital; the need for ‘time out’ away from stressful work environments, the need for a place to express the emotional, psychological and spiritual cost of caring away from the bedside, a place for the patient to face up to the challenge ahead or to get away from the tedium of the long-stay ward into a specially engaging and peaceful environment. And a place for all in the hospital community to give a little time to the deeply human need to struggle towards meaning and purpose in life and work, in sickness and suffering, in loss and bereavement, whether or not such need has a religious expression.
Such a space needs to be ‘other’ than the clinical hospital environment round about: it has to be special, so that people are drawn to its use and so that its very existence symbolises a concern for the spiritual, emotional and psychological needs of all in the hospital community whatever their personal beliefs may be. Such was the shared vision developed and focussed within the Royal Infirmary Chaplaincy Team across the seven or so years from before the building began through to the completion of The Sanctuary project. Making it possible for people to ‘find sanctuary’ is not about buying new seats and religious furnishings for a hall space, but rather about thinking through and braving an integrated design in which the potential to find sanctuary is written into the very fabric of the place, creating an ethos capable of meeting the aspirations mentioned above.
Having dreamt it and lobbied for it and sometimes struggled towards it, we know that in this space we have found Sanctuary and hope that you do too.
