Is Nothing Sacred

Martha Hodges - 2006-06-11

All things are either sacred or profane.
The former to ecclesiasts bring gain;
The latter to the devil appertain.

Ambrose Bierce, journalist and satirist, crony of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, wrote these words in 1911. In his Devil’s Dictionary, he went on to define the word “sacred” this way: SACRED, adj. Dedicated to some religious purpose; having a divine character; inspiring solemn thoughts or emotions; as, the Dalai Lama of Thibet; the Moogum of M'bwango; the temple of Apes in Ceylon; the Cow in India; the Crocodile, the Cat and the Onion of ancient Egypt; the Mufti of Moosh; the hair of the dog that bit Noah, etc.

Hmmm, I thought when I came across this definition. Sounds like a Unitarian. Sure enough, there he was in the online dictionary of UU biographies. What is it about us that makes us so easy to spot when it comes to matters of religion? A penchant for deflating the self-importantly solemn, for challenging cherished beliefs and assumptions, for holding these up to the light and saying, Um, excuse me… just what is the meaning of this?

A noble tradition in its own way… but also a perilous one. The danger is that we become so pleased with our own cynicism that we forget how to take seriously some things that deserve to be taken seriously – things like our own need for meaning and nourishment of the spirit.

I know something about this because I grew up this way. In my Unitarian family, god help you if you uttered a platitude. As I grew into adolescence, I became so fearful of appearing sentimental that I avoided any expression of tender feeling or passionate interest in anything. My more worldly older sisters did not hesitate to label things “trite” or – and this is a word I learned from one of them just a couple of years ago – “jejune.” – which, by the way, in case you don’t know either, means “uninteresting or intellectually undemanding; lacking maturity or sophistication.” That sums it up pretty well, I think. We UUs don’t care to appear jejune, do we?

My twenties and thirties were partly about getting over this denial of the power and importance and validity of the non-rational, the non-verbal, the intuitive and emotional and idealistic. Today, I believe that this is what separates religion from mere philosophy – what makes Unitarian Universalism a religion and not just a school of thought or system of ethics. I believe that reason is the ultimate test of whether or not our passions and intuitions and emotions deserve to be taken seriously, but these other ways of knowing give depth and richness, meaning and beauty to experience. Reason alone cannot do all this. And this is where the question of the sacred comes into the picture.

How can we who prize reason and science understand the sacred in a way that makes acceptable to us our own need for it? For I’m convinced that we do need the experience of the sacred in our lives. Before I can explain why I believe this, I need to tell you what I mean when I use this word, sacred.

One meaning of “sacred” is that which is sacrosanct – beyond challenge, diminishment or debasement – as in sacred duty, sacred vow, sacred honor. This isn’t what I have in mind today. A broader meaning of “sacred” refers to that which is associated with the worship of a supernatural deity – a sacred object, a sacred relic, a sacred text. That’s not quite it, either.

My understanding of the sacred is this: the sacred is whatever allows us to sense a relationship between the world (including ourselves) and ultimate reality, meaning, ground of being, creative good – whether or not we call this ultimacy god, whether we understand it to be supernatural or firmly situated in the natural order. For convenience’s sake, let’s call this mysterious ultimate truth, reality, this animating energy, source of meaning, this force that transcends human control or understanding – let us call it, just for today – the divine. (I would call it god, but I understand that this word “god” is simply too loaded with associations of superstition and images of an anthropomorphic super-being to be acceptable to many of us. And I’m hoping you won’t tune out to what I’m saying because of semantics here.)

So…The sacred is whatever signals to us that this thing that we’re calling the divine is present in our lives. The sacred is whatever gives rise in us to feelings of awe, reverence, and deep and genuine feelings of connectedness, or humility, or, alternatively, of grandeur. We recognize its presence by our response to it – whether it is a place like the Grand Canyon, a painting, a giant redwood, a Mozart aria or a jazz riff, the touch of a lover or the embrace of a child, a mathematical formula, the sweet release of being forgiven, or our presence at a deathbed.

I want to tell you about one of my experiences of the sacred. This is a hard story to hear, perhaps, but it is one I feel compelled to share with you. This happened during my first hospital chaplaincy at a large hospital in Seattle.

I was paged – and every time my pager went off, my mind and body would go awash in adrenaline and dread – I was paged and told to report to the room of a mother who had just miscarried – what is euphemistically referred to by hospital personnel as a fetal demise. As I knocked on the door and entered the hospital room, I saw a very young girl – perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old – surrounded by three or four other teenagers. She was eating a big plate of pancakes. The Maury Povich Show was blaring from the television. Whatever Maury and his guests were talking about was being greeted with giggles and cries of “gross!” This was not what I had expected.

In answer to my question, the mother replied that she was doing fine; the nurse had taken the baby away to be cleaned up but she would like “it” – a little boy of twenty weeks -- to be baptized. I should come back later, she said. Every time I checked back, the infant had not been returned to the room. On my last check with the mother, she told me that I had just missed him; the body had been taken to the morgue. I offered to bring him back to the room so that she could witness the baptism, but she said, “No, that’s okay, you can do it there.”

There followed a nightmarish sequence of asking various nurses for directions, taking several wrong turns in the maze of this huge hospital, searching for someone with a key, ending up finally in a small room with a metal table, glass cabinets containing medical supplies and a refrigerator. The technician who had let me in removed the baby from the refrigerator and handed him to me. He was so tiny that it felt like the white blanket in which he was wrapped was empty, but peeking out of the top was a perfect little face. A beautiful little face.

What was I to do? I had seen baptisms in the movies, but that was about all I knew of them. I didn’t believe in baptism, and if I had, religions that practice it forbid its being performed on a dead body. I knew that much. I also knew that Christians – I had been told so by the Christian students in the program – I knew that Christians would not want a non-believer like me to perform this duty. The mother was nowhere in sight. She would never know what transpired in this little room – whether I baptized this little boy or not. Well, I baptized him, as best I could.

I did it because this teenage girl, apparently so oblivious to what had just happened to her, trusted me to do what she could not, or would not. She had, probably unintentionally, delegated to me the task of mourning this child. And I did mourn. Alone with this featherlike bundle from which life had vanished – alone with this perfectly formed and unmourned little being – I felt the absolute, inarguable need – the sacred need – to perform some ritual, to make some sign to the universe that this loss – this life -- had significance. That this child mattered, if not to his mother, then to someone – me – or to some thing – the universe, the creative power of love, the divine. I held him and talked to him… and I baptized him. It was probably the most powerful experience of the sacred I have had – and I hope never to have another like it.

It was this experience, more than any other, that made me aware of my need for a word to describe such an event. And the word that I needed was “sacred.” And if I need such a word, then I’d be willing to bet that you do, too. Whether or not you believe in God. Whether or not you consider yourself to be a religious person. Whether or not you have been conditioned, like me, to scoff at superstition, the sentimental, and the jejune.

The sacred points to the existence of meaning, whether or not we understand the nature of that meaning, whether we believe that the meaning is created by ourselves or exists apart from us. The sacred validates us by demonstrating through our emotions of reverence and awe that we are somehow connected to a controlling force. And this connection – with nature, other people, with a sense of justice or beauty – this connection affirms our own place in the world. Our own significance as feeling beings without whom the universe would be less than it is. This is why we need the sacred.

There is a wonderful book that I often turn to when I’m in need of help to think something through. Maybe you know it. It’s called Spiritual Literacy. The authors, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, talk about how religions provide different “filters” through which to view the sacred. The sacred, they contend – and I agree – is out there and all around us, but if and how we see it depends on something much narrower, something limited and culturally determined. The way we see the sacred depends on religions and the metaphors that religions give us to help us understand reality and our place within it. They mention four such filters that allow us to glimpse the sacred.

The first is what they call sacramentalism. This is the traditional Christian way of understanding the sacred, as well as the way of primal religions that look to the natural world as evidence of deities at work in the world. This is also the view of those who believe that the world is proof of intelligent design. In this understanding God or the divine manifests itself through the created world. In the metaphor of Bishop Fulton Sheen, the universe is a windowpane through which you see through the visible to the invisible God. The divine is not immanent, present in all things, but is a transcendent reality to which the earthly merely points.

Panentheists, on the other hand, believe that god is present in all things and all things are present in god. God or the divine is not synonymous with nature, as in pantheism; God exists within nature and within all that is. An ancient Welsh text that expresses this idea goes like this:

“I am the wind that breathes upon the sea, I am the wave on the ocean, I am the murmur of leaves rustling, I am the rays of the sun, I am the beam of the moon and the stars, I am the power of the trees growing, I am the bud breaking into blossom, I am the movement of the salmon swimming, I am the courage of the wild boar fighting, I am the speed of the wild stag running, I am the strength of the ox pulling the plow, I am the size of the mighty oak, and I am the thoughts of all people, who praise my beauty and elegance.” Many UUs will recognize this vision of the sacred. It speaks to many of us, especially those of us whose religious beliefs are neo-pagan or earth-centered.

A third filter is divinization or sanctification. This is another view that is familiar to many UUs. Human life is sacred because we are made in the image of the divine or contain within us a spark of the divine. We are not god, but we are vessels containing god. This is the understanding of our own Unitarian Transcendentalists – Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott and Parker. It is also the understanding of many UUs who identify as mystical or religious humanists.
The last filter is also a very strong thread in Unitarian Universalism—the concept that all creation, human and non-human, is interconnected, that the world is one. This is the Buddhist view. It is also the view expressed by our very own seventh principle, as well as by many of us who identify as humanists. It implicitly avoids identifying the divine with a supernatural deity. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls this understanding of the sacred “interbeing.”

Here is an example of what this means, in his words:
“Whenever I touch a flower, I touch the sun and yet I do not get burned. When I touch the flower, I touch a cloud without flying to the sky. When I touch the flower, I touch my consciousness, your consciousness, and the great planet Earth at the same time… The miracle is possible because of insight into the nature of interbeing. If you really touch one flower deeply, you touch the whole cosmos.”

Maybe one of these ways of understanding the sacred, or more than one, speaks to something in you. Each one, of course, is the stuff of multiple sermons and tomes of theology and poetry. These are mere glimpses of the different ways that women and men have tried to put their finger on this experience of wonder and reverence that we humans are uniquely capable of. Maybe it’s this, our sense of the sacred, that makes us human.

I dare say that even old Ambrose Bierce knew exactly what it feels like to have the sacred give him a swift kick, to remind him that he was not alone in the universe. Even proud skeptics and rationalists, sophisticated grownups who have been known to poke fun at traditional religious ideas and language -- even we may be brought up short by the sacred if we are wise enough to watch for it. If we permit it to, the sacred that surrounds us and permeates us will teach us how we are related to each other and to the web of all being. May we be blessed with frequent reminders to watch for the sacred; may we recognize it when we see it, whatever we may call it; and may we let it transform us. It is waiting all around us… to make us not more godly, but more fully human. And this is how we save ourselves. For that matter, this is how we save the world.