It has been said that on the spiritual path the way to Heaven can sometimes be through Hell. Similarly, the experience of the sacred can be directly through the cold heart of the profane. However, in our times where there are constant and continuous attempts to assassinate the sacred, the profane is often (ironically) deified in itself as the center of an impermanent human existence.
These attempts to eclipse the sacred, to forget it out of existence, take many forms, but one thing most of them share is that they are superstitions (irrational assumptions and attitudes based upon magical, materialistic thinking). Such superstitions can take the forms of postmodern relativism and deconstructionism, the ideology of materialism, scientism, political utopias (as in neo-Marxism), de facto nihilism, militant atheism, and distractions of all sorts.
But the sacred does not go quietly and easily into the night of pure profaneness (in which there is no center, no purpose, no meaning or significance, no values, no goodness, no truth, no beauty, no God). The sacred may be suppressed, neglected, attacked, mocked but its death is greatly exaggerated.
The sacred is not an addendum to life, a projection or unnecessary digression. It is the pulse of life and love, the presence of the divine and eternal in the heart of the transient and time bound. The sacred is an epiphany, a theophany, “eternity’s saturation of the finite,” the theistic Presence hidden behind the brash, but fragile, masks of the profane, a presence of “gritty and painful grace… where here and eternity are one.”
Here are the first two stanzas from my poem, “Meditations: The Sacred”:
Sacramenting all mattering
in a dramatic ritual sweep
through the scandals of time,
the sacred converts the profane
into itself, changing stubborn
habits of being into spontaneous
worship of the godly mystery
of God beyond all theologies.
Truth spirals through
the raging, rugged
rapids of delusions,
retrofitting them
with consecration
to a holy & auspicious
circle of good hope,
dawning with eternity.
The attempts at murdering the sacred and throwing its remains into bottomless pit of oblivion have failed and will fail for the sacred is what makes being and existence possible. The predatory profane shrieks for attention and acclaim, but it is the sacred that patiently endures, waiting with wisdom, to transform even the most vain-glory kind of profaneness. The blood of the sacred is love, the very thing that the profane dreads and can never comprehend.