The Sacred is Everywhere

Originally Published in the Castlegar News on July 20, 2023 (Page A4)

“The world is a vampire,” an angry Billy Corgan droned in the first single from 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Nearly thirty years later, those words still resonate enough to name the Smashing Pumpkins' latest tour through our world “sent to drain.” 

In a world filled with noise and clutter, the clearest message we often receive is one that drains us of our beloved humanity. Everywhere we turn, we are told that we are not worthy of love unless we purchase a particular product or buy into a particular system of belief. On top of it all, I’ve found myself noticing a mounting pressure to keep up with the ever-accelerating pace of change. We can rage all we want, yet Corgan wails, “despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” 

The world is not as it ought, we do our best, but change is slow to come. It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.

Trying to keep up, to pay the rent, the mortgage, to afford food, electricity (let alone concert tickets), the pressure builds. Our desires—for love, hope, belonging, and enough—have been betrayed in exchange for a piece of the game. It’s no wonder we are lonely. Our wheels are spinning just to keep up. Time is a luxury we can barely afford. 

While I wish it weren’t so, the church often falls into the same trap. 

All too often we religious folk drink the kool-aid, thinking that if we just stay relevant, just keep moving, just play the game, we’ll be able to convince others to trade Sunday morning brunch for our gathering over a simple meal of bread and wine. But how often do we notice when our impulses echo the bait and switch of targeted facebook ads and late night infomercials, laying on the guilt, playing off our fear or shame?

Such tactics are the opposite of good news. I don't know how it is for you, but I often know when I mess up. I know when I’ve gotten it wrong. The scenes keep replaying in my head over and over again. I don’t need to be reminded of my imperfections. I've got that down. If anything, I need to be reminded that I’m loved. That message is hard to find in this world. It’s a struggle within the church, too.

That’s a long way of saying that I'll never be a great evangelist for a church that specialises in guilt, fear, and shame. 

Perhaps like many readers of this newspaper, I have little time for religion that talks about God’s love, all the while dishing out hate. I’m not here for religion whose main selling feature is some far-off heaven for the few, all the while condemning the many to suffer in daily hell.  

I am no evangelist for the church of old, in no small part because I am coming to discover that the way of Jesus invites all people on a path towards collective liberation. It’s a path of accepting ourselves as God sees us—beloved; a path of accepting others as beloved too. It’s a path devoted to living as though our neighbours are worthy of love, putting our faith to the test and reputations on the line in the face of oppression that is at once systemic and personal.

Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth century activist and mystic once wrote “The soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.” 

This seven-hundred year old wisdom says in no small part that rushing around to find God is a task both misguided and futile when it assumes that God is somewhere over there, somewhere beyond our grasp. The search for God ought not require us to culturally commute to a world so very unlike our own. What it requires is that we slow down, centre ourselves, and open our awareness to the very presence that buoys us in our daily lives. 

At its best, this is what Church is about. It’s a place where we come to slow down, to listen, to pay attention for a love so amazing, so divine, that we are filled and surrounded by all that we need. Church, at its best, is a community of people who—in the midst of the challenges of their daily lives—come together to pay attention to the divine presence. To listen in silence, in scripture, in song, and to respond to the inner voice of love. 

In an overstimulating world of noise, the gift of the church—including the gift of the St. David’s congregation I serve—is the opportunity to slow down, to listen, and to be renewed in the work of justice through God’s whisper of love: “Remember who you are. Remember you are worthy. Remember you are enough.” Remember this for yourself, and in your daily life, offer those reminders to others, too. We all need to hear them. 

Sometimes it will be enough to sit in appreciation. Other times we will be called to speak up against injustice, violence, and hate. Still others, we will be called to act against the systems of oppression that keep us caged in isolation. In all of it, we must not forget that the loudest voices aren’t always right. Sometimes it’s the loving whisper that carries the day. 

Which is another way of saying that the sacred is everywhere, even (perhaps especially) in the places we least expect.