No Unsacred Places
“There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.”
-Wendell Berry, “How to be a Poet”
The Franciscan motto Deus Meus et Omnia means “My God and all things.” God is a thin layer of dust over all things. Imagine a room with worn tables, books with yellowed pages and frayed edges, torn leather chairs. Dust dancing in the orange sunlight that has filtered through the windows. They land everywhere, you see. Observe them carefully, all old and new things, all clean and dirty places, and all moving creatures. My God and all things—the holiness visits us in all places. All places are born with holiness in them.
We make the distinction between the sacred and the profane when no such division actually exists. We choose to commit violence against ourselves and the holiness in which we live. Then we call it profane as if it was born with that name when actually, it is a disturbance that our hands and perceptions have created.
When we build a physical temple or an altar and say that the inside is holy and the outside is not, then the boundary that distinguishes between the profane and the holy is obviously man-made. When we place people into circles and look with contempt or a self-righteous concern at those outside of ours, the boundaries are less obvious yet no less clearly demarcated. Humanity is singular. We have torn that wholeness. When we look at a place and secretly think, “that place doesn’t concern me, because I am not there,” we’ve divided the world that was previously one piece into many.
Drawing boundaries is not limited to abstract thoughts or some lofty subject matters. The manner in which we live out our day determines how much we recognize the sacredness that covers us. The act of dicing time and thoughts into controllable elements and labeling and directing them according to our emotional needs chops up the wholeness of our life as well into unrecognizable, bloody pieces. Then we wonder why we feel incomplete, all while looking at only a hand, an ear, or a head.
I ask myself how many times I desecrate the spaces my thoughts and body encounter during the day. How many times I repeat to myself, I like this or don’t like that. How fun, how boring, how dissatisfying, how annoying. What to do first, what to do next, what is the right direction. How many times, in this constant thinking, putting to order, packing, and analyzing, I narrow my vision and forget to take in the holy dust that covers everything in sight.