The Holy
The sacred. It sounds like a thing. It’s not a thing, it’s a
relationship. Sacredness is real, but the sacred may not be. What is sacred?
That which sustains us can be sacred. We can make it holy by
honoring it and enacting its holiness.
As humans we are embedded in many realm which sustain us. We
are sustained by the sun, source of all energy. We are sustained by the earth,
the literal ground of being, the earth beneath our feet. We are sustained by
water, without which there is no life. We are sustained by the living earth,
the biosphere. We are sustained by the primary producers, the plants, who make
the air breathable, who bind sunlight into food, whom we ear, whose bodies we
use for clothing and shelter. We are sustained by the animals, our companions,
who feed the plants, whom many of us eat, whose fur and skin we wear. We are
sustained by our families of birth who bear us and feed us and teach us and
protect us while we grow. We are sustained by our families of choice with whom
we make our home and raise our children. We are sustained by our children, who
give us love and a sense of the future. We are sustained by our communities
which give us purpose and context, companionship and assistance. We are
sustained by our own bodies, our own unconscious functioning, which we cannot
control but constantly rely on. We are sustained by art, giving us new ways to
see the world. All these contexts, nested, overlapping, sustain us, but we may
not see that. We may see ourselves as separable, as independent. We may not
realize that separating ourselves from these worlds pulls the ground out from
under our feet, and will, in the end, kill us. We may think we can prosper at
the expense of our community. We may think we can pollute the water as it flows
away and not eat and breathe our own toxic waste. We may think that honoring
life is saving the ‘life” of the fetus without honoring the woman in whom it is
embedded. All of these are
mistakes of context. Thinking that an individual is the increment of life and can
live independent of context creates fallacies. It creates heresies. It creates
profanities. The sacred is known in honoring the greater wholes of which we are
a part. Since those contexts are greater than our conscious mind, we cannot
know them fully. We cannot shape them to our own ends, as their components and
their feedback loops are not within our grasp.
