Sacredness

I've been thinking a lot about what is sacred to me and why? I could pontificate but I read lovely ash's blog this week and felt this particular message summed it up better than I ever could. Thank you ashley.



The great risk taken by religion and poetry—the risk that politics is unwilling to take—is to speak in a language that can only be heard by the people who are sensitive enough to be affected by it. A prophet, for instance, cannot see the utility of demoting his language to achieve a certain goal (say, to get someone to stop smoking or to be peaceful and kind) because the sacredness created by the language is the goal itself. The goal, to put it in such crass terms, is to create a sacred world that would compel its inhabitants to evaluate everything in their lives in terms of that sacredness, not to achieve a piecemeal victory here or there. The consequence of this commitment to sacredness is vulnerability; it is the willingness to speak in a language that can be dismissed and mocked by everyone who has not voluntarily become meek, awe-struck and grateful enough to be moved by the sacred. It is a decision made knowingly, and what it knows is this: that its presence will only be appreciated by those who are sensitive enough to feel its loss. (Indeed, all of religion and poetry operate in this way. For instance, it is decidedly untrue to say that people without the gospel are necessarily unhappy—or that people who drink are not good or people who kill must be full of guilt. The fact is that our happiness and guilt is determined by our sensitivity. If we are not compelled by an initial feeling of sacredness, our decision to do or not do something is moot; if we are not moved by a holy desire, our doing something will bring us nothing but circumstantial perks and our not doing will bring us no more sorrow than lacing our shoes. Both are dead without sacredness; doing and not doing will amount to the same nothing.)
- Ashley Sanders