Senses of the Sacred

Sylvie Shaw 

 What is the sacred? Is this gorgeous eucalypt sacred, and to whom?

The sacred is what's special, precious, tender. It's something to be treasured and held dear. It may be a connection to the divine, the incomparable, to beauty. It can be compared to love, to passion, to the utmost joy, to the ecstatic, to compassion, to taking care of what we deem is beyond understanding, while at the same time, we hold it in our heart.

The religious theorists Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade made a distinction between the sacred and the profane or mundane. But in a contemporary post-secular world, this distinction between the sacred and the profane has blurred. The sacred is no longer 'set apart' from the profane, but is embedded within it (Durkheim 1912). Religion not only makes the everyday sacred, it is sacralised in the everyday through ritual, ceremony and relationship.

According to Durkheim (1912): 'All known religious beliefs present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal... into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred'. 

In contrast, Colleen McDannel (2012) maintains that these two concepts, the sacred and the profane, have become scrambled. Her scrambling imaginary can be seen in popular culture, in mediated 'idologies', phantasmgorical narratives on screen, clever tricks on the sporting arena, in luscious song and dance sequences from Bollywood to Cirque du Soleil, and in the sublime refrains of nature's beauty. Perhaps it is in nature's awesome glory that Durkheim's variance between the real and the ideal are made into one.

Ecopsychology writer John Swanson (2005) maintains that 'we come to know the sacred through our personal experiences'. Swanson continues:
'Nature's powers command our attention and respect. These experiences of nature can take hold of us in ways that cause us to change our ways, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. The language used to describe these changes will effect us differently based on our unique religious background'.

Connecting to sacred nature is transformative. It affords a new or different way of seeing the world and the process of our lives. Through insight, people may have a change of heart and change their behaviours, becoming more environmentally aware and responible (Roberts 1996). Their sacred nature blurs or scrambles with the sacred in the natural world - and they (or we) become one. 

Questions and comments:
- Write about your own experiences of nature and the sacred.
- What is your favourite place in nature?
- How are your experiences sacred or how do they encourage or create sacred experiences?

References
Durkheim E. 1912. The elementary forms of the religious life. Excerpted in: http://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html#pgfId=6641
McDannel C. 2012. Scrambling the sacred and the profane. In Lynch G. and J. Mitchell with A. Strhan. Eds. Religion, media and culture: A reader. 135-146. London & New York: Routledge.
Roberts E. 1996. Place and spirit in land management”, in B.L. Driver et al., eds. Nature and the human spirit. Toward an expanded land management ethic. State College, PA: Venture Publishing Inc.
Swanson J.L. 2005. Experiencing the sacred in nature. http://www.ecopsychology.org/journal/ezine/archive2/sacred_nature.pdf 

Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/red-gum-flowers-red-gum-gum-flowers-73648/