What is sacred?

 

 

Sacred: late 14c., past-participle adjective from obsolete verb sacren "to make holy"

 

What is sacred in your life?  What do you make holy?  How do you make something holy?

 

Sacredness to me is not a place but an experience of tenderness and an acuity of the senses exquisitely tuned into sensing. It comes unbidden when I feel the cool early morning air on my skin and smell the fragrance of the earth or when during a walk in the forest a bird pauses at eye level right by my shoulder to sing.  To notice these things is to make them holy. Looking into my daughter’s eyes for the first time was holy as was the translucence of her tiny ears.  

 

The feeling of sacredness comes unexpectedly and brings us from the mundane to the holy in an instant. My walk along the Charles River when my daughter was in surgery was not unlike a pilgrimage I might have taken along an ancient Spanish trail.  Each step was a prayer made sacred by my broken open heart.     

 

My body sometimes feels sacred when I am deeply connected to the feeling of life flowing through it, when I am aware of the thread of breath that someday will leave me, when I remember that there will be a last time I gaze at my daughter’s face, smell the rain, hold hands.  Birth and death make life sacred and every movement holy, the placing of my feet on the floor at the beginning of the day, the turning of my face towards the sun, the talking to my mother on the phone. The things we love that will someday leave us are holy. 

 

Every moment can be a holy moment.  It requires only tenderness, surrender, and wonder.  It cannot be manufactured but it can be practiced the remembering of the preciousness of life.  The sacredness of each meal made holy by the texture of the bread and sweetness of the jam, the onions and the potatoes in the soup.   

 

Is there anywhere where the sacred does not exist?  Acts of violence are not holy but what about the people who commit such acts like the rapist and the murderer?  Those that have forgotten their holiness and the sacredness of life, of touch, of relationships can end up desecrating life. Violence desecrates relationships but never people.  There is holiness where there is courage and prayer even in the midst of violence.  There is holiness where one finds protection and forgiveness.  There is holiness in the purifying boundaries of anger and rage against the violators.  Holiness in the ways we try to redeem ourselves. 

 

Sacredness is not performative, it is embodied. Rubbing my father’s feet as he was dying transported me from the ICU to a gothic cathedral with soaring columns and high windows.  And when he died the roof of the hospital dissolved and a chorus of Ohm poured in from the sky.