Sacred and Ordinary

All manner of sacred things in this world are defined by an inexplicable ability to defy the gravity of reason. In other words, the limit of language withers at the boundaries of the sacred. How can we speak about things beyond reason? Any attempt is approximation. To speak in certainties about the sacred is arrogant; the only respectful action is to dutifully trace the outline. If sacred things, like love, grace, or transcendence, are fundamentally unspeakable, then the truth lies in describing only what it is not.

If you felt love, can language capture exactly what it is? Or does the true experience transcend language?

If you ever wept at a goodbye you didn't understand, if you ever sat in silence next to someone and felt something more than speech could offer, then you approximated something sacred. The unknowable is somewhere beyond reason. It simply is.

The ordinary things in this world are bound by the pull of reason.

Life is reasonable: our parents created us.

Death is reasonable: we are born into a finite body.

Pets, things, and places are reasonable: we can trace their creation.

The sacred within ordinary things exists tangentially at the finest point: the consuming fear of death, the possessing love of life, the transcendent care for those special to us. The existence of the ordinary becomes the spring of the sacred.

But what made the ordinary possible?

It is fair to say that all ordinary things of human life were created by humans. We can trace the creation of material things. Likewise, it is reasonable to say that humans were created from total chance: events in the cosmos created the conditions for life to begin, the pendulum we are bound to. We understand that the universe began with the Big Bang. Somehow, quantum fluctuations in a vacuum set the stage for the Big Bang. But why did a vacuum exist at all? Why did something fundamentally exist rather than nothing? It is beyond our cognition.

The something rather than nothing is sacred.

We believe that we can reason the existence of something as mundane as a plastic chair. Quite simply, we manufactured it from raw materials. At the scale of daily life, this holds true. But when we zoom out to the cosmic scale, to the genesis of something from nothing, even the possibility that this plastic chair can exist is a wonder beyond reason.

This wondrous, terrifying, and miraculous existence itself defies the orbit of reason. We may only describe existence as "not possible." Yet we are here. The gravity of reason affects the ordinary from the human lens, but it collapses at the cosmic lens. Through this collapse we discover that everything is sacred. And this realization is the genesis of obedience and reverence.

Obedience: the demand of this sacred existence. The gravity of being and reason.

Reverence: the only suitable payment. The surrender of the self and language.

Everything that exists is a miracle. The constitution of divinity is in our absence. We are something, but we own nothing. This breath, this movement, this life is a temporary gift. To live is to be a debtor to something beyond cognition. At any moment, it can all be taken away. Nothing is in our possession. In this, the soul is not owned; rather, it is lent.

Through our daily reverence we must act as stewards rather than owners: this is the requirement of obedience. This surrender is the vitality of deep compassion and love for our fellow humans, an eternal flicker. How could I knowingly harm another human if I recognize the impossibility of their existence? Their existence inspires awe. To harm their impossible existence would be a desecration of the sacred.

It is from this realization that everything is sacred that requires me to accept death as divinity. I am but a human in an impossible existence, yet I breathe, think, love, suffer, and cry. I should not feel terror at my return. I should not mourn the removal of my beloved. Why would I fear the end of an impossible life? I have been blessed through paradox. The possibility of death is the requirement of obedience.

I must commit myself to unbecome, to become a permeable layer between the unknowable and real so that I may love and do the least harm to all that is impossible. The ordinary is not ordinary, and their incomprehensible existence demands total surrender.

To love is to surrender in reverence.