This Sunday's post is an excerpt of today's Zoom talk: "The Safe and the Sacred"....A safe space is defined as "a place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment or any other emotional or physical harm." It really can be a mental health tool for those who are marginalized or have gone through trauma. What is safe is a range of not in danger or not likely to be harmed: not damaged nor injured, or without risk or even disagreement. The Sacred, in the religious/spiritual sense, means something that is dedicated or set apart for the expression, or worship of a deity, or religious ceremony. It is consecrated and invokes spiritual respect and/or devotion, awe and reverence. and is not to be tampered with, not to be changed or challenged. Of course we also have the meaning of a secular kind of sacred, Monday Night Football or or taco Tuesday, or like the poem below, your car. The sacred then becomes a kind of hyper-value system that others cannot disrupt or mess with it that has it's own meaning for you that may or may not have spiritual meaning, or maybe it does it its own way that you cannot articulate, or is not really conscious. What makes something sacred? Within religious structures, history and religious authorities determine the sacred, often a fixed idea that can date back to centuries of dedication, passed on through generations.
When you grow up in a religious frame work, the sacred is integrated into your thought structure, and your experiences either solidify that or shatter that, (like unanswered prayer, or trauma when you cannot find the meaning), or you are exposed to a larger world beyond the family frame of reference. As individuals, we find the sacred through our own internal sense, just as we have the capacity to sense threat and to sense our own safety and the safety of others. As with the sacred, our sense of safety or threat is shaped, framed, honed by care-takers when we are young. But there is also a natural awareness--the sound of thunder, the lightening strikes, the slithering reptile, the scary mask, loud angry shouting, physical pain itself, based on our sensory perception but also a neurological translation of that sensation as threat, or for something else as comfort, the presence of others, a hug, a lullaby. So safety is a blend of knowledge--passed on to us, sometimes specifically taught and sometimes indirectly taught through modeling--and innate, some of which I'm sure is genetic, encoded 'knowledge' across generations that becomes instinct.
We know the sacred in the same way. We directly experience it, the way a kid senses threat and safety. It obviously is not a perfected sense in humans. The coding can be wrong, or incomplete, both in a collective sense, as well as for a specific individual. Circumstances change, yet genetic coding is mostly a process that develops over generations. And belief--what we have been taught by others--can be in conflict with our direct experience, which we have also been taught to some degree to either pay attention to, or ignore. And what we have been taught can become obsolete. To quote the Tao de Ching, "times change and with them their demands". Still I am affirming in 2023, the power and presence of the sacred that reveals itself through our intuitive and sensory perception...
For some of today's poetry, follow the link:
https://rolfpotts.com/sacred-stephen-dunn/