The Sacred in the Profane

My mother died on Sunday, November 29, 2020 at the age of ninety-five years old. I was fortunate enough to be with her as she took her last breath – something I was terrified of doing before I actually did it. I was so sad to lose her, and scared that her last moments would be dramatic, traumatic, melodramatic, but instead it was a quiet, peaceful departure from this realm…her breathing slowed down more and more, and then she just…stopped. She was gone. What had animated her all these years was no longer there. She was no longer “herself”. Her body was just a body, but Virginia Estelle (“Estelle” means “star” in French) was not here anymore. This experience could be looked at as a profane experience…it’s what we all must do, at some point, and it is part of existing in the first place, but it could also be viewed as a sacred experience…the passing from this world into the next, whatever that may be. Passing into the great mystery. I watched her go as I smoothed back her hair, and told her for the millionth time how much I loved her. For me, a self-declared Agnostic Pagan, it was a sacred experience. It was an out-of-the-ordinary experience, though it happens to people every day, all over the world. It is common. It could be called “mundane”. It is simultaneously both of these things: profane and sacred.

The sacred is embedded in the profane, and the profane is imbued with the sacred. All of our lives, our deaths, all of the details in-between are filled with minutiae that make up our lives, and in every fleeting moment the sacred lives, and even lives on after death, in the hearts of the ones left behind. The sacred and the profane are not separate, they are joined together, like night and day, part of the same cycle and rhythm. It is up to each of us to choose how we perceive “reality”; we can view it through a sacred lens, or a profane lens. Witnessing my mother’s last breath made me realize how sacred each breath we take actually is…something we take for granted, as our bodies breathe for us all day, every day of our lives. But what a spectacular miracle that is! A miracle that hides itself inside itself, for us to find, if we look a little more carefully.

Mircea Eliade writes in The Sacred and the Profane about Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred), published in 1917, in which he discussed the “modalities of the religious experience” (Eliade, 8), focusing mainly on the irrational element of the religious experience. God was seen as “a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath” (Eliade, 9). This divine wrath may have been feared because of the death experience, or due to circumstances beyond human’s control, such as natural disasters, but ancient people saw this immense power as something outsideof themselves, something that could not be controlled; maybe not as something that they were part of, and belonged to, or that belonged to them. This divine presence presented itself as something “wholly other” (Eliade, 9), and facing this, humans felt a “profound nothingness” (Eliade, 10).

Eliade writes that the sacred “is the opposite of the profane” (Eliade, 10). I would disagree, in that my own experience has shown me that the two are not opposites, but work together in this world; what appears to be profane has the sacred embedded in it, or is supporting it; we just become so “used to it” that we take it for granted and overlook it, mistake it for something else. The sacred is in everything all around us, and inside of us all the time. It is not something to be feared, because it is part of us, and we are made from it.

Eliade writes about hierophany, which indicates “something sacred shows itself to us” (Eliade, 11). Eliade says that “all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany” (Eliade, 12). Eliade states that “The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal” (Eliade, 12). I think that the real and unreal merge together, and are one and the same. We may come from the unreal into the real, or we may come from the real into the unreal. We come from a mysterious place, that we will return to, but which is really the real, and which is the unreal? If it is a combined force, they are one and the same, so there is no polarity, there is only ebb and flow of the same cosmic force.

Eliade writes that “desacralization pervades the entire experience of the non-religious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies” (Eliade, 13). I think this is a personal choice, and not an absolute truth. I also don’t think that a person needs to label themselves as “religious” to live a life full of sacred meaning.

Eliade states that “sacredand profane are two modes of being in the world” (Eliade, 14). Eliade writes of archaic humans that “We need only compare their existential situations with that of a man of the modern societies, living in a desacralized cosmos, and we shall immediately be aware of all that separates him from them” (Eliade, 17). I think that humans can find new meaning, or renewed meaning, and new sacred experiences through scientific exploration, and a new way of finding sacred meaning through more understanding of how energy works, and that we are all a part of that energy, not separate from it.

Harvey Cox writes in The Future of Faith of “a profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness” in our time (Cox, 1). Cox speaks of the “rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual withinthe secular” (Cox, 2). Instead of being two separate entities, they are bound together, part of each other, and work in conjunction with each other.

Cox writes that “Faith is about deep-seated confidence” (Cox, 3), whereas “Belief…is more like opinion” (Cox, 3). Cox discusses three periods of Christianity: the “Age of Faith”, which began with Jesus, the “Age of Belief”, which occurred when the Emperor Constantine the Great utilized Christianity as a device to create an elite ruling class based on creeds and dogma, that lasted approximately 1,500 years, and the “Age of the Spirit”, which is presently unfolding.

Cox states that Fundamentalism is declining (not just within Christianity, but within all major religions around the world) and that the current “Age of the Spirit” has more in common with the first “Age of Faith” than with the second “Age of Belief”. Cox emphasizes the idea that it is more important how a person lives and acts in the world, rather than what they believe. Cox writes about the Gospel of Matthew (25:31-46), speaking of Jesus: “He insisted that those who are welcomed into the Kingdom of God – those who were clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and visiting the prisoners – were not ‘believers’ and were not even aware that they had been practicing the faith he was teaching and exemplifying” (Cox, 19). I think it is possible to be a part of the sacred, to fully participate with it and in it, without even realizing it, by approaching the world with a sense of wonder and openness, by being present to the daily ebb and flow of life all around us, and from not shying away from “difficult” experiences, as they are part of the larger picture of our lives. I think we can find great meaning by just being present and aware, and can connect with a “greater power” without even labeling it as such. Cox writes that “The experience of the divine is displacing theories about it” (Cox, 20). It is a lived experience, and is around us, and inside of us all the time.

We are born into this world, into this “profane” realm. Unless we have some kind of magical powers, none of us know where, exactly, we came from, why we are here, or where we’re going. My personal belief (my personal faith?) is that we are part of the Universal Energy that created everything and that we are exactly where we’re supposed to be at any given time or place, doing what we’re supposed to be doing. The sacred is inside of us; we are the sacred.

When I was little, I had the distinct feeling that I would turn into a star when I died…I’m not sure where this belief came from, and oddly enough I still believe it today, but in a more “practical” way of merging with the Cosmos; that my energy will join the stardust, the constant flow of matter and energy. I am not a scientist, and I have no proof of this myself, but I find comfort in the thought of turning into a bright, shining star, with no pressure to do or be anything other than a glorious light in the sky. As someone who has recently lost my mother, and is left “behind” in the profane world, seeing her as a star to guide me gives me solace, too. The magic is inside of us; we are the magic.

The sacred is in the profane, in my opinion. It is found everywhere, in everyday life, from the rabbits in the field, to our most dearly held relationships with each other, to the setting sun, and on and on. We become so desensitized to the details of our “mundane” profane lives, but every breath we take is sacred, and every second is sacred…this became abundantly clear to me recently watching my mother take her last breath, and spending her last few seconds on Earth with her. As heart-wrenching as that experience was, it helped me to realize more profoundly how immensely special and sacred every single moment is, every single experience, whether labeled “good” or “bad”, and that love (the sacred) truly is the only thing that matters and is the glue that holds our profane existence together, imbues it with life and meaning. We are sacred.

Works Cited

1. Cox, Harvey, 2009. “Chapter 1: An Age of the Spirit; The Sacred in the Secular?”. In Cox, Harvey, 2009, The Future of Faith. Harper One, 2009. PP. 1-20.

2. Eliade, Mircea, 1957. “Introduction”. In Eliade, Mircea, 1957, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt Brace & Company: A Harvest Book, 1957. PP. 8-18.