In his The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade speaks of the break in the space that is brought about by that which connects individuals with the divine (see here a video in which I speak about this). For the majority of peoples, the place of worship provides this separation. It is the Center of the World, from which humans take their own being. And so, Eliade says, “the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the center of the world” (43). The Center of the World, the place of worship, “is precisely the place where a break in plane occurs, where space becomes sacred, hence pre-eminently real” (45). Thus, in traditional villages, the church is placed in the middle, and all the other houses are built around it. The reality of each one of the villagers, their being, but also the being of their own dwellings, depends on the communication (perhaps communion) with the divine.

The fortified churches of Transylvania provide plenty of examples for this. See below the fortified church of Biertan (I found the photo on Wikipedia):

“The centrality of the church does not appear everywhere,” a friend of mine recently told me. “In my region, in Moldova, churches are built on a hill. When you go to church on Sunday morning, you go up the hill, just as you walk to Golgotha. You don’t just go to the church, but you are ascending there, you make an effort to be there. Those walks with my grandma when I was a child are more memorable to me than what happened during the service.”

It is, of course, a different manifestation of the same attitude toward the sacred. We still have the break in space, but this time with a new aspect. The sacred is not only separated; now it also requires a journey. The same road was taken for burials, since cemeteries were also placed on the hill. It may be a suggestion that our lives are such journeys to Golgotha, the final destination. But it may be more than that–a delicate understanding of Christianity that gives us a Kingdom which is already present but still not fully yet here, and thus a walk to Golgotha, to death, on every Sunday of the resurrection.