A simple answer
When I was growing up in a religious household, only certain things were considered sacred – holy, set apart, godly.
Now that I’m old, I’m not so sure.
I was taught that the Bible was sacred. I had to keep it safe and turn its pages carefully. The Sabbath was sacred. No work was to be done during those 24 hours. Nor was I to talk about ordinary things like what happened at school in the past week but had to talk about sacred topics like God’s Plan for Mankind, the Plain Truth, Christ’s Imminent Return, or The World Tomorrow. The seven holy periods, scattered throughout the year like steppingstones to eternal life, were sacred. And God was the most sacred of all.
My parents instilled in me that God was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. These long, melodic, mesmerising words fascinated me. They flung arcs of stars through my little brain as I said them over and over again. Omnipotent. Omniscient. Omnipresent. Omnipotent. Omniscient. Omnipresent.
The prefix omni means all. So, in child-like terms, they meant God was the most powerful thing that existed; he knew everything there was to know; and he was everywhere all at once. This last bit, about being everywhere at once, bothered me.
In my mind’s eye I see myself at about ten years old, in our back yard, wearing a blue dress, holding an open Bible to my chest, looking up beseechingly at the sky in a northerly direction where I thought God lived, with a question forming that I hoped he would answer. (He never did.)
The question was:
If you are omnipresent, which means you are everywhere at once, doesn’t that mean that everything I see is really just you?
Our back yard had a swing and a set of bars to climb on. A poplar tree. A compost heap. A Hills Hoist. A bird cage containing thirteen green and yellow budgies. A camelia bush that flowered deep pink. A stunted almond tree which blossomed every August. Red steps leading up to a blue back door. If he were indeed omnipresent, God lurked in all these things. It was his omnipresence that made him omnipotent and omniscient.
But I knew God was in heaven on a highly decorated throne, surrounded by a choir of angels who never stopped singing and, unlike me, always sang in key.
This confusion about where God lives has lessened as I’ve aged.
Now that I’m seventy I look back at my ten-year-old self and smile. I want to lean down, move aside the curls covering her shell-like ear and whisper this:
You are right. God isn’t a petty male being in the sky holding commandments carved in stone that threaten death to those who don’t worship him. God is the invisible, energizing essence that flows through all things. What you sense is true. Everything is sacred, including you and all you see.
Thich Nhat Hanh said it this way:
I think God is on Earth, inside every living being. What we call “The Divine” [the sacred] is none other than the energy of awakening, of peace, of understanding, and of love, which is to be found not only in every human being, but in every species on Earth.
Coleman Barks, the American poet and translator of Rumi, quoted Rumi’s fellow-poet, friend and source of inspiration, Shams Tabriz, as saying:
The core of sacredness is recognising the soul in each other.
I will go further and say that the core of sacredness is recognising the soul in everything, the one soul that thrums invisibly in all that we see.
When we sense that, we sense we are immersed in the flow of everlasting sacredness, and have no need for commandments, special books, or holy days.
What is sacred?
Everything.
With love, Marlane
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