I. The Introduction: Or how this topic came to be.

A. 1. It arose in part from my professional work here as a teacher at Sewanee, particularly in my work in comparative religions. This is a field where we look at many religious traditions: at ways of being religious and of how the sacred becomes manifest to people. A perennial topic is sacred places, places that are consecrated and set apart because the sacred has been manifest or disclosed there. A related but subsidiary topic is the phenomenon of the center, the place were the revelation of the sacred occurs, the space thus made sacred by that manifestation. In my teaching in comparative religions, looking at the sacred disclosures and traditions of China, India, Japan, of Europe and the American Indians, of Africa and Oceania, I have read about and studied such sacred places and sacred centers for many years.

A. 2. A second area of inquiry was added for me about 15 years ago when I began to teach a course called Southern Religion. Even in a place like this, I had no idea how popular such a course would become, nor had I any inkling how much my own intellectual biography and pilgrimage would begin to be caught up in and transformed by teaching this course. As I studied the religion and culture of the South, I began to notice how important in American history and in Southern history in particular were the special days of gathering. These were days set aside by regular calendar or by event or by prolcamation for a community to gather: muster days when the local militia units drilled and paraded, court days when the court sat and heard cases, hanging days when executions were carried out, festival days for thanksgiving for safe passage to the land or for victory in battle or for the escape from pestilence. There were more ordinary gatherings too: the days when the ship arrived from England or New Orleans; the day of the first blossoming of the Serviceberry trees when the church services would begin to be held again. Or days of barn raisings and quiltings and shuckings and hog killings. And days of hunts: the great riding hunts of the Virginia and Carolina piedmonts and the hunt days of the mountains and the vast wet timber bottoms.

Over and over I noted these days and their importance to Southern people. Always they were occasions of gathering, of going to some place to be with other people. Always they were days anticipated, prepared for. And always they were days marked by personal, public, or religious ritual: the special ceremonials that recognized the importance of the day and the event celebrated. I came to refer to these events as "gathering rituals", and the South knows many of them--from the most organized and formal to the most informal. Nor were they only the affairs of courts and churches. Social life was marked by special days and by gathering rituals, and eventually as the society developed new activities such as athletic events would become part of the pattern of gathering days. This Homecoming is a gathering ritual.

A. 3. Another factor in all of this was my continuing theological reflection [if it can be called that; I am not much of a theologian] on hunting and flyfishing. It occurred to me as I studied the south and as I hunted that hunting, too, has its rituals and that some of its rituals intersect with the larger life of the culture: I am thinking not of the blood rituals of first kills in the deer woods or of bourbon poured out in salute to the spring gobbler or the kype-jawed trout, but of the great gathering that Southerners make out of the opening day of dove season. It is not just a first day of fall hunting, but a day of finely orchestrated gathering: of the low and high, of the distant and the nearby. Those of you who have hunted know of what I am speaking, but for the rest of you, let me tell you that such hunts have very little to do with killing birds. Such hunts are carefully planned, down to drawn numbers for shooting posts, invitations are sent [and vied for], the field is groomed more carefully than ever for planting or harvest, a tent or shelter is erected, food is laid by, and a host of helpers are on hand to pick birds, carry beverages, and serve food. Sometimes there is a country band to play and even a guest of honor such as a judge, senator, or corporate executive. And on this day, something not found on most other southern hunts: the women, often in newest camoflage, are present. Sometimes they shoot, sometimes they carry on at the tent. It occurred to me--especially when the scents of Georgio and Liz Claiborne fragrances were stronger than the smell of labs or gun oil--that all this preparation and doing was not just about hunting; in fact, hardly about hunting at all. Here in the midst of a modern, post-agricultural society were people persisting in archaic pursuits who otherwise would never go near guns or game or fields, and who on that day could not imagine being anywhere else. This is the power of gathering rituals whatever their form: they compell us to come and be present and dance the ritual and talk the talk.

B.1 All of these ruminations would lead to two public lectures for the university in which I began to pull together some of these ideas. In the first, about four years ago, I began to reflect on the pattern of Southern settlement that emerges when we trace the planting, year by year, of the southern towns along the coasts and rivers: a nearly circular pattern always defined by access to water and thence the gulf or ocean. For nearly two hundred years, Southern settlement defined a narrow band of intensive development along waterways with some but little penetration into the uplands. As I began to recognize this feature of southern cultural geography, it occurred to me that the South was a land without a center, that its major settlements and interests were always geographically peripheral, and that it tended to drain itself away toward its coasts and what lay beyond them instead of building itself up by the accretions toward a center. The reality of this history is reflected to this day in the impoverished core of the south defined by the high piedmont, plateaus, and mountains. I gave this lecture, "The Land Without a Center," for the Sewanee Summer Seminar.

B. 2. I was almost immediately asked, "But what about Sewanee? Where does Sewanee fit in to this?" That query led to another lecture, "Sewanee in the Land Without a Center", a follow up in which I attempted to answer a colleague's jesting question, "Are you going to tell me why I am teaching in this god-forsaken place?" I replied then, "Well, sort of." I argued in that lecture that, in a sense, that was exactly why Sewanee was where it was: in a God forsaken place, in a land without a center. It was put here to be a center, founded to establish a center in this land, not just of the Cumberland Plateau, but of the South itself. It was meant, using the words of Mircea Eliade, to be a place of both "being and power", a place that would be and by being, would empower with truth and knowledge those around it and those who came to it.

C. Then, one day last year, when Yogi spoke to me about doing this lecture today, he read the sense of all this better than I had when he said to me, "Why don't you do that lecture of yours on Sewanee as the center of the universe?" Ah! Exactly. And in that image three strands of my thought began to spiral into coherence.

II. This is my case: that, in a sense I hope to make clear, Sewanee is the center of the universe. That is, I believe we can apply the concept of the center taken from comparative religion and use it to understand both something about the South and about Sewanee: that Sewanee is a center, a cosmic, sacral center. And as a center, it generates a sacred geography and it becomes a focus of gathering rituals and of pilgrimage.

III.

A. The most accessible discussion of the symbolism of the center is found in the writings of Mircea Eliade. His books, Patterns in Comparative Religion, The Sacred and the Profane, Cosmos and History, and Images and Symbols, develop in detail through many cultures the idea of the sacred center, the special place at the center of the world. "Every microcosm, every inhabited region," he says, "has what may be called a 'Centre'; that is to say, a place that is sacred above all. It is there, in that Centre, that the sacred manifests itself in its totality..." He cautions, however, "that we must not envisage this symbolism of the Centre with the geometrical implications that it has to the Western scientific mind." Such thinking obscures the point: in the sacral world what we have instead "is a sacred, mythic geography, the only kind effectually real, as opposed to profane geography..." And "It is in such space that one has direct contact with the sacred." [Images and Symbols, pp. 39-40]

The presence, the manifestion of the sacred, created the center by interrupting the flatness of the ordinary world. Eliade says that the sacred "irrupts" and breaks the flat space of the profane world. The center is perceived to be a center because something different is experienced there; it is not ordinary. "The center, then, is pre-eminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality. " [Cosmos and History, p. 17] "The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world." [The Sacred and the Profane, p. 30] Thus, "The colonization of unknown territories is always a consecration; to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods." [Ibid, p. 32.] "...settling in a territory is equivalent to founding a world." [Ibid, p. 47]

Further, the center created by the manifestation of the sacred becomes, in its vertical dimension, an axis mundi, an axle of the world, the intersection point of heaven and earth, the point where heaven and earth are joined. Often such a center point and axis of the world is associated with a mountain, a holy mountain lifted up above the ordinariness of the flat world, and "The summit of the cosmic mountain is not only the highest point of the earth; it is also the earth's navel, the point at which the Creation began." [Cosmos and History, pp. 12-17] From the axis and the center, space extends to the four directions. Among traditional peoples, villages and cities were often laid out from such centers, and at the center point a building such as a temple or tower or monument was erected. Around the center and the sacred building the four directions--the quadrangle--stretched away to the horizons of the world. [The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 42-47]

Finally, centers are further consecrated not only by the irruption of the sacred and the organization of space around them but also by their becoming places of enactment, places for the performance of ritual, and by their becoming places of pilgrimage. It is this last idea, perhaps, that gives us better access to the archaic universe of sacral space than centers and sacred buildings; in our profane society we know few such sacred centers and places, but we still pilgrimage even if we do not consciously understand why. Eliade observes that "The sacred place is what it is because of the permanent nature of the hierophany (disclosure of the sacred) that first consecrated it....There, in that place, the hierophany repeats itself. In this way the place becomes an inexhaustible source of power and sacredness and enables man, simply by entering it, to have a share in the power, to hold communion with the sacredness." [Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 368] We come back, time and again, to the center because we find the sacred, the important things of life, there.

III. B. If you have been making the same creative interpretations as I have as I read this material, parallels to the Sewanee experience come to mind. In 1857 the founders saw their work in this place as the establishing of a center, a center of learning and of religion--a place of sacred knowledge--and in erecting a cross and in the raising of a few rude log buildings saw a work of creation in a wilderness: the sacral work of organizing a new territory. Sewanee began to be perceived as and to function as a center early in its history, and early on was a goal of pilgrimage as "Lost Cause" southerners journeyed here to receive instruction from heroic Confederate veterans now university professors. [See, Charles Regan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, especially Ch. 7] Such pilgrimaging was in place in the southern mind long before the end of the Nineteenth Century. In the Twentieth Century, with the waning of the fervor of the Lost Cause--and with the deaths of increasing numbers of Confederate veterans--the meaning of pilgrimage began to shift from political heterodoxy to spiritual fulfillment. However cryptically conceived, Sewanee stood for the old values, and young men--and at length young women--came here to learn the old values. And they or their children would come back again and again to return to those values and be renewed in them and by them. Sewanee had become perceived as a center of important things--things at once Southern, Christian, and personal--and pilgrimage was made here.

Sewanee's sacred geography is disclosed in another way in the structure of this campus: Eliade notes that often the axis mundi, the axle of the world, is alined with a sacred mountain which becomes the intersection point of heaven and earth. This is the image given to us in the great east window of All Saints' Chapel where the throne of Christ in the New Jerusalem is aligned with Sewanee Mountain. The throne of Christ is directly above the mountain and the waters of life which flow from the throne fall upon and flow down from this mountain. Only a school like Sewanee--only a school with Sewanee's Anglican heritage--could get away with a window like that; yet it is perfectly consistent with the nature of this place: a sacred center replicating the redemptive work of God in the new creation.

Nor is that all, because the structure of this campus affirms a sacred geography in yet another way. It was the custom of older Christian churches to locate themselves and to define the secular geography of their environs by orienting the church to the east and then deriving the secular geography from the location of the church. All Saints' is laid out just as it should be: its great altar is to the east. The nave axis and the crossing axis define the cardinal directions: east and west, north and south. On this campus, in this town, if you know where the chapel is, you know where you are relative to geomagnetic compass directions. The Chapel, at the center, anchors a sacred geography that provides a continuing orientation--not only to freshmen but to all who seek their way here.

IV. A. Now, let me come at all of this from another approach. At one time in my early days here, I thought Sewanee was perfectly described in a passage I found reading about another traditional society, Lafcadio Hearn's Japan: An Interpretation. Hearn wrote of Japan,

"Fortunate mortal! The tide of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is enchantment, --that you have fallen under the spell of the dead,--that the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away as last into emptiness and silence."

And I could not forget his warning, "But remember, you have fallen under the spell of the dead." For a while, I thought that was Sewanee, exactly, a place of enchantment but also a place of the dead. A place of static present and static past where nothing ever changed. A place of death. It was a two-fold grace that led me to a deeper insight: the living grace of this place which has its own genius unmatched, I believe, by any other place in the world. It was this place that bidded me into a deeper meditation about its meaning. In time, Sewanee would discover itself to me.

I began to find thought and words for it in a second grace: in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, a text forming for me my own private quadrivium, four learnings, anchored in the Bible, the Prayerbook, the Boy Scout Handbook, and the Four Quartets. (Now, I realize that there are some among you perhaps who do not give canonical status to the Boy Scout Handbook nor even to T. S. Eliot, but never mind!)

The Four Quartets are an extended meditation on the temporal and spatial trajectory of incarnation. In a sacred cosmos--in a created world--there is always a center (what Eliot calls "the still point of the turning world"), a point of revelatory unfolding, a point of disclosure--and the center thus defined in revelation, in manifestation of sacrality, is always approached in the studied and disciplined journey we call pilgrimage. For Eliot, in these poems, the center is given in a small English chapel, enclosed in a farm yard hidden behind a barn. He is speaking of pilgrimage:

If you came this way,

Taking the route you would be likely to take

From the place you would likely to come from,

If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges

White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.

It would be the same at the end of the journey,

If you came at night like a broken king,

If you came by day not knowing what you came for,

It would be the same, when you leave the rough road

And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade

And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfillment. There are other places

Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,

Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city--

But this is the nearest, in place and time,

Now and in England.

Eliot's figure is the little chapel where King Charles I sought refuge in his flight from Puritan soldiers. This God-forsaken place, this abandoned chapel once pigsty, is the figure for the the emblematic center, the central and symbolic place: a goal of pilgrimage where the rose is hidden and where the fire, pentecostal fire, living fire, yet burns:

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

This is why, I think, we come time and again to Sewanee as to any place of pilgrimage: to hold conversation with and to hear again the voices of the dead, voices tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. Put off now sense and notion. For you are not here to instruct yourself or inform curiosity or carry report. Kneel in the sacrality of this place of pilgrimage. Kneel and listen to the voices of the dead:

Charles Harrison

Gaston Bruton

Allen Tate

Abbot Martin

Baley Turlington

Ned McCrady

Arthur Dugan

Maurice Moore

David Camp

Jim Brettmann

Ken Jones,

my first mentors, and yours, in this place. Listen, listen, listen. The walls are on fire with their voices. Now and always. This place. This center. Sewanee.

GERALD L. SMITH/SEWANEE, TN/25-10-91