Daniel Blakely Landscapes of the Sacred 3

Lane discusses the ability to make a sacred place by using rituals to make it extraordinary. This idea is bizarre to me in the fact that he talks about how a church (which to me seems like a sacred place in itself) could be made sacred through the rituals that the neighboring university students did before football games. Before a big game, the students would like 1,500 candles, and pray for the teams victory, and this is said to be the reason for this location to be deemed sacred. I simply don’t understand how that makes a church, of all places, sacred. In my eyes, a church is a place to go to be closer to God, and to be close with that which is holy and good. Football, however, is a man made game whose sole purpose is to inflict pain on the opposing players. The two do not connect in my mind as needing one another to be considered sacred. Some may find rituals to revolve around the football season or even games, however that does not make them sacred but instead only makes them important to the individual.