THE THREAD | The Practice and Practicality of the Sacred

My dad receives Richard Rohr’s daily meditations via email and occasionally passes them along to me. When I asked for writing prompts two weeks ago, he wrote to me, “Read this. Then, in your writing,  respond specifically to the last paragraph.”

So here we go:

“There is no secret formula to experiencing the sacred in our lives. It just takes practice and practicality. The deep truth of our lives and the fullness we are striving for don’t happen with someone giving us the code to deep knowledge. Meaning and faith are not secret things. Sometimes what we need most is to remind one another of how the divine is all around us, calling us to see and taste it for ourselves.”

- Becca Stevens

1.     When I was a child, the most groovy thing I ever heard my father say was, “I’m not a human doing, man. I’m a human being.” He would say this as he sat on the couch with his feet kicked up on the coffee table, reading a book or drinking coffee or just sitting there doing nothing. There were plenty of chores to do, more tasks on his list, more money to make, more people to help out. He has always been someone willing to jump up and do the chore, complete the task, make the weekend cash, go the extra mile for a friend. But then he would always, always, always sit and rest. And it wasn’t a temporary breather before the next thing. He would cease exerting himself for a moment. He would opt out of being ultimately defined by his efforts. He would not do. He would simply be. This gave me a sense at an early age that rest itself is sacred.

2.     The thing about buying someone else’s Secret Formula to Experiencing The Sacred is that the purchase first and foremost serves to expand the seller’s empire of influence. The harder task is listening to my own deep desire, discovering the question behind the desire as well as the energy needed to walk the long lonely road toward my own answer. I willingly buy yet another secret formula because it always appears to be a shortcut, but it turns out to be a dead end. We find ourselves after many years needing to circle back to the same places we thought we’d traveled far beyond. It turns out that we are all ill-equipped to even know where to begin, or to begin again, or how to even get our bearings. How stupid is it that often the place to begin is smack-dab in the middle of my own damn chest. Sheesh. Just give me someone else’s TED Talk, please!

3.     The myriad energies and activities of Earth do not exist to provide humans with a sense of sacred meaning. Rather, we are formed by, exist alongside, and participate within the energies and activities of Earth, which is, taken altogether, sacred.

4.     The human insistence that the universe conform to our desire for meaning and purpose is ego clamoring for power and control. Such a demand is quite different from our basic desire to assert our creaturely selves fully and freely into our daily existence. Meanwhile, we are invited daily—by sunlight, trees, rivers, eye contact, touch, heartbeat, and so much more—to shed the incessant gnawing need for more—including more meaning and purpose and success—and to allow the shed layer to die off and go dry. We can leave it behind on the path, like snake skin or cicada shell. We can shed and let die whatever the thing is that tells us life is about winning via Secret Formula. Free of this illusion, something better waits ahead.

5.     Even as I am trying to argue against a Secret Formula to Experiencing The Sacred, the temptation is to articulate something that will still sound prescriptive: There is no secret formula, but try X instead!  There is no secret formula, just figure out how to BE! Get rest! Find Sabbath! Cease all commerce! End the frenetic activity! And THEN you will find the divine! So much bullshit in the path.

6.     I am anxious. I know I can find peace and calm because I know I have found it before and I trust I can find it again. But also, I am anxious. Two of the most sacred and restful things I do are typing and touching. I type out words and I touch the skin of people I love. I write and I reach out. I do these things in order to connect. Connection is sacred. Connection is rest. Some days I think I should take up smoking cigarettes. I need something most days to keep my hands busy when I am not feeling connected. I wonder if smoking cigarettes might be a healthy alternative to social media.

7.     I’ve been looking at images sent back to earth from the James Webb telescope. I’ve been reading and learning about what this new telescope is capable of showing us. NASA says, "Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe."

8.     Speaking of stupid, here’s what is stupid about modern spirituality in the first place: It IS something that requires practice and practicality. But those are the same words you can easily apply to a passion project or a side hustle, or leaning in or chasing your dreams or following your bliss, or any of the other bullshit catchphrases sprinkling the book spines in the Self Help or Christian Living sections of Barnes and Noble. Want to achieve X? Practice GRIT. Want to pursue Y? Just get in 10,000 hours of practice. Want to unlock Z? Take this personality test. Need more __ in your life? Just read Nehamiah’s Nine Steps to Rebuilding Your Sanity: Old Testament Wisdom for Modern Bullshit!

9.     When I think about the places I have experienced the sacred in my life, I think about the night sky above the Arkansas River headwaters in central Colorado. I grew up spending every summer climbing onto the roof of the lodge where my family stayed. I would watch the sky for hours in complete solitude. The Milky Way was alive and vivid. The shooting stars were endless. The constellations told silent stories from every ancient culture that came before me and taught me without speaking that I am small and I know next to nothing and yet I get to be here, part of it all, living and breathing and loving and receiving and giving. And even if my years on this earth are nothing more than the flick of a grain of sand, my experience of it gets to deepen and grow richer if only I will slow down enough to catch a small glimpse of the sheer scale of space and time. But while the night sky in my childhood was vivid, endless, and sharp, now when I am far enough away from city lights on a clear night and look up, I notice that my eyes struggle to adjust and strain to bring the stars into focus. The sky is full of wonders as ever, but my eyes cannot see as well as they used to. They are out of practice.

10.  My life is short and small, yet I am given this interiority —what the hell is this thing, a soul?—that can choose against all forces demanding that I speed up and work harder and accomplish more. In spite of these forces, I can choose to rest, be, gaze, feel, kiss, taste, listen. There is no Secret Formula. There is no need for one when we have been given these senses and this weird interior organizing principle that we can intuit and cultivate into something that is able to grow closer toward the very source of life and love that has been present from the very beginning and which we are only beginning to understand.

11.  I do not need to earn my right to rest.

12.  So many points of light from the birth of the universe have just arrived here after traveling 13 billion years. Or, more accurately, we at last discovered a new way to see what has been present from the very beginning. And here we are, part of it, still learning to see. Our eyes are able to slowly adjust, yet how often we forget to look.