Look up, look beyond the ordinary things of life

ACROSS the world the skylines of towns, cities and local communities include churches, mosques, temples and shrines. The chances are that they are very different from the buildings that surround them.

They will be taller or larger or have a special shape and may well have been built before any other existing building in any particular community. Such are our 'religious' buildings or sacred spaces.

Because they are prominent and usually well sited, their very size and shape makes a very strong statement. For example, Blackburn Cathedral standing right in the middle of the town says in effect "Blackburn has acknowledged God since the community has been here since AD 596.

Much of human daily life is very ordinary,but there are those special times -- celebrating birthdays, going on holiday, giving birth to our children, falling in love, as well as those other times of being angry, doing wrong and facing up to illness, even death.

These happy (or sad) experiences point beyond the ordinary. They might be called 'extraordinary' because they involve our deepest inner selves and the whole range of our emotions in a way that ordinary life does not, and they may well be linked with special people or special places.

Our sacred places help us to be constantly reminded that human life at its most fulfilling includes responding to God, the giver of all life.

Their spires, towers, minarets, pinnacles, all point upwards as if to say "look up, look beyond" the ordinary things of life into the life of God beyond.

Christians believe that at Christmas, Jesus became the 'human face of God' (as Bishop John Robinson put it in the 1960s). No wonder Bethlehem in the Holy Land is one of the holiest of places.