Swimming the Sacred River

What is divine? What things are sacred and what makes them so has been debated since the notion was invented. For many religions, even up to this day, sacredness has been seen as a kind of extension of a transcendent personality. In this general perspective, God, say, is inherently sacred (being God and all) and anything that God does, creates, or influences becomes itself holy. Of course, this orientation requires a dualism, where some things are sacred and some things are not. The not-sacred things/events/actions can range, depending on who you ask, from the blandly mundane to the wickedly profane, depending on those things’ relation with the source of sacredness.

In some (not all) immanent systems of thought, the divine can be seen as something injected into or living within the stuff of the universe. In these cases, even though there is a strong relationship between matter and the divine, the two are nevertheless separate “substances”. It is even possible to see sacredness as a kind of material property.

There exists, of course, countless argument and conceptions of the divine and its relationship to humans. But I would like to offer a completely different view of divinity (of which I certainly do not claim ownership). If you, like me, accept that spirituality is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, then perhaps you might agree that sacredness can be defined, not as a property (whether transcendent or immanent), but as a lived experience. In other words, something becomes divine because one experiences it as divine.

In this view, the source of divinity is us. As such, sacredness does not require a force or transcendent personality. Neither does the process of sacralization change the nature or essence of an object (even when that object is the self). Rather, what changes is the relationship between the person and the object. My primary area of interest in all this is in the nature of that relationship—its causes, consequences, scope, sensations, and meaning. These are things I hope to explore for, well, the rest of my life, not just intellectually, but personally.

This is the grand adventure of spirituality. There is no end goal out there, no Ultimate Truth to ascertain, no perfected state of being to accomplish. There is only the creative, dynamic flow of life, each person being an integrated part of the Universal All, unique and yet one with everything. In the religious naturalism, pantheistic view, being spiritual doesn’t mean altering one’s essential self, it means developing an ever more complex, mature relationship with the self and the world in a way that is highly meaningful, fulfilling, and joyous. This is the divine journey and what it means to swim the Sacred River.

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