What is...

...Sacred? A former teacher of mine once asked the class to define what it meant to each of us. He made his way round the room asking each person, and as I listened to the responses of "my children," "my family," "my friends," "my time," "God," "Earth," I began to find it more and more difficult to pin down exactly what it was that I found sacred in life and about life. In a way, I agreed with everyone, that these things all were indeed sacred, and so my list kept growing with each person's answer. Is it all simply relative to the individual, I wondered, or is there a universal sacredness to anything? If it's relative, I thought, then nothing is really sacred in and of itself, it's us that makes a thing sacred. If there is something universally sacred, then what is it? When it came my turn, there had been such a laundry list of sacred things mentioned already, I had to say "well, it's either nothing, or it's everything, I can't decide which." It had to do for my answer at the time, because I truly couldn't decide what I thought. Years later, I think that whatever it is we can all agree is "sacred" has to have something to do with sharing.

We really only ever show just bits and pieces of ourselves to one another. A shared conversation here, an inside joke there, our workplace personaes or our political musings, a lazy Sunday evening dinner or a grumpy Monday morning phone call. And that's what's sacred, those moments and parts of ourselves that we share. Here we are, isolated and scared little human beings, wondering what the Hell is going on, yet we somehow have the courage to reach out into the darkness and feel around for something to hold on to and someone to tell our secrets to.

It's why boundaries, and respect, are so important. This little piece of me that you saw last night after drinks and cigarettes and raucous laughter is not the piece of me that I show my mother at 4 PM on a Tuesday. Lovers of course know the ultimate significance of boundaries and sharing, those most secret and passionate moments that they can share with no one else. (Those men that swap stories of conquest with their friends are denying the existence of their participation in something sacred; they rationalize their refusal to commit, assuage their guilt over abandonment.)

What part of ourselves we share with another person depends on a near infinite number of things, but we certainly never share every bit of who we are with another person. There's no way we could, and there's no way we'd want to. So much of who we are inside our thoughts is hidden from view, and so much of what it means to live in our time and place means that there are taboos and limitations and just plain practicalities that keep us from seeing many, many parts of each other. (Fear is one of the strongest forces in our culture too, and it keeps us very separate from one another - "don't ask, don't tell.") So what we end up with as a result is a very limited picture of each other, like a patchwork quilt missing most of its squares. Some of our pictures are more complete than others, but they're all incomplete.

If someone asked me today to define the word "sacred," I think I'd still have an awfully hard time coming up with a definition. The best I could do is describe what it looks like to me. There's nothing inherently sacred about me, or you, or our children, or any thing you might name. If our bodies have souls, or if we all have some energy or vision or spirit that extends beyond our bodies, it is not a sacred thing. My body, whether greater than the sum of its parts or not, is not a sacred thing; in fact, no thing in isolation is ever sacred, that goes for a rock or a mouse or a god. What is sacred is the interaction between all of those things, all of those bodies in motion throughout this barely seen universe continually bumping into one another, purposefully, and randomly. Where we overlap is where the sacred lives; in experiencing each other, we experience the divine.