Dan's Thoughts

Trish #35 - July 21, 2004

Well, Trish is getting out of the hospital on July 30!

She will then began out-patient therapy. The doctors and therapists are amazed at her progress and we are giving God thanks.

What a couple of months this has been for us! It has been a season in our lives like none other; at once dislocating, scary, loving, -- what else?

How about sacred?

Today my friends, Ed and Yvette Rooney, asked me if I could put into words what is the central concern of my ministry. "Sure," I said, "I want to help people recover the sense of the sacred."

I really do feel that way. I want to help people find their way to an encounter with the Holy. It is, alas, the one theme I have had great the most difficulty expressing.

Last Sunday, I was reading an article in the Phoenix newspaper about how "Sunday lost its special status in America." The article reported that in the last two generations, Americans have decided that treating Sunday any different than any other day was silly and non-productive. To close a store one day a week! Imagine! How preposterous! As I read it, I felt increasingly sick.

Abraham Joshua Heschel writes in one place that all the world religions have consecrated places. "In contrast," he said, "biblical religion places only a minor importance on sacred sites. Biblical people placed much more importance on consecrating time. For when people consecrate time, they create an opportunity for experiencing an altered reality for themselves. They also can begin to imagine a altered reality for the world around them. A Sabbath thus comes to "feel different" than other days to the believer. As it approaches, the believer begins preparing himself to experience that difference. Such transforming moments can thus lead to the consecration of people. The consecrated people, in turn, may have experiences which get remembered in the sites in which they happen. So, Heschell concluded, if we fail to consecrate time we will fail to consecrate ourselves. If we do not consecrate ourselves we will not experience the transforming grace that flows through us into the world.

The world's spiritual health then depends upon people having the ability to experience the sacred

But that begs the question. What is "sacred?"

Thinking about it, I came up with a list of descriptive words. Sacred is beauty, awe, risk, the feeding of ones soul, a silence that is not merely the absence of noise but a sense of being stunned by glory, reverence, respect, and the bowing down of one's inner being before the Almighty. (If I take more time I can surely do better than that list. But it will do for the moment.)

I believe that the sacred has been eroding in our culture and in our churches.

Even in my lifetime, parents used to tell their children things like, "Don't run in the church. Don't walk up on the platform. Take your hat off." Later on such teachings would get ridiculed as "silly tradition." To me, they were attempts to guard the parameters of the sacred. The people who taught them were trying to keep the sacred and the profane from becoming indistinguishable. They were trying to keep times and spaces available to where we could flee from all that is trivial, temporal, and numbing.

There is a famine in American culture. It is hungering and thirsting for a sense of the sacred. So it tries to recreate that sense in movies, sports, and rock concerts. The secular culture has been grasping for the sacred at the very time that churches have been abandoning the concept. But how can the soul even remember that it exists without an opportunity to encounter the sacred? That's why America will either encounter the sacred or the demonic. It cannot remain indifferent. Our souls are too hungry. Eternity must be addressed.

Feeling this way for a number of years, my cry has been, "Lord, everything around us seems ever more profane and base. Is there no holy anywhere, even in our churches? Where do I go to find the presence of God and holiness in this increasingly profane culture?

But when I think about it, the only word to describe our past two months is "sacred." On June 1,Trish and I got jerked from our everyday life. Our schedule and plans got firebombed Our lives got changed forever. We had a choice. We could either curse and moan or, we could invite the presence of God into our situation. We decided to pray. We didn't pray frantically. We didn't try to force God to do what we wanted. We just asked Him to walk with us through the fire.

I first asked Him to quench the fire. He didn't. But since He didn't quench it, I asked him to transform it into an instrument of blessing for us. This, I believe, He has done. For we have certainly met God in this fire.

Grace changes profane things into sacred things. An ordinary day, an ordinary person, or an ordinary place that gets caught up in the presence of God will become a very different thing after it encounters holiness. We only have to ask and God will take the most terrible things -- even our sin -- and transform them into encounters with glory.

Like all sacred things, this season of our lives has involved a swirling confluence of death, loss, pain, joy, awe, life, relief, danger, beauty, uncertainty and love. That is a turbulent place to be. And yet, there is something about it that has fed our soul. For it is in such moments that the soul may remember itself, get uncovered, reemerge from its long hibernation, stir itself and reassert the truth about its existence. Such sacred moments can remind us: "this world is not my home, I'm just a passin' through."

I have always loved Wordsworth's Ode To Immortality. I especially love the line:

Not in entire forgetfulness,
and not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

When all is said and done, that is what the "sense of the sacred" is: the soul finding its way home.

Dan