Everything That Is, Is Holy

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
– Wendell Berry

A lot of us struggle at heart with not compartmentalizing our faith. At worst, God is no more than someone consigned to Sunday morning rituals or devotional routines, by way of a habit so engrained that we don’t stop to question it. At best, we occasionally experience something more, some taste of the sacred, but struggle to bring that into the realities of everyday life. There exists, on one hand, the sacred sphere, one in which we yield ourselves to God, in which we give him our attention and energy, our contemplation and service. Then there is the secular sphere, in which we are consumed by all the big and small demands and distractions of the world around us. How, we ask, do we merge the two? Which, because most of us live more of our lives in the secular sphere, is to say, how do we bring the sacred into the secular?

But I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. The question I’ve been asking lately is, what is the basis for how I function in the secular sphere? If I pull apart all the activity, what I find underneath is a kind of self-centric meritocracy. I am central to my own meaning. I am responsible for discovering my own meaning. I am what I do, and I am worth what I do. “While it pretends not to,” David Brooks writes, “[meritocracy] subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.” He places meritocracy in a wider cultural context as follows:

I’ve found in myself, and I think I’ve observed in others, a certain meritocratic mentality, which is based on the self-trusting, self-puffing insights of the Romantic tradition, but which is also depoeticized and despiritualized. If moral realism saw the self as a wilderness to be tamed, and if people in the New Age 1970s saw the self as an Eden to be actualized, people living in a high-pressure meritocracy are more likely to see the self as a resource base to be cultivated.

Meritocracy says that the self is a resource base to be cultivated. It is defined by its talents and tasks. We push our kids through a panoply of activities, hoping that a spark of skill or the result of sheer grit will lead to some amazing achievement. We are slaves to accomplishment and productivity, to the status markers that tell us who we are or whether we’ve arrived in our careers or personal lives. And faith becomes a part of that. God evolves into a prop for our personal ambitions, or perhaps an escape from the pressures of the rest of life.

But that is not who God really is. He is not a magician waving a wand. He is not a vending machine. He is not an occasional good feeling. He does not ask for a task or accomplishment. He doesn’t want adherents who tout an opinion, but disciples who follow a way of life. He doesn’t ask for fans who check the boxes, but players who risk it all in the field.

The fact is, there is no delineation between what is holy and what is not. As Thomas Merton puts it: “Everything that is, is holy.” The spiritual life at its core is not an activity. It is not another item on the list of things that we do. It is not primarily a skill to be maximized. It is a reality, the only reality, in which we do everything else. The question is not how well we merge the sacred and the secular, but how well we live into the reality of the sacred in all things.

In this reality, God is central, not me. Our value is something held entirely separately from anything that we do. Our experiences are not only a result of our own efforts and discoveries, but God’s revelations and graces. We are in this world, we are to casual observers operating as much in the secular sphere as anyone else, but we do it for radically different reasons. Not for the meritocracy. Not for ourselves. We do it for God and as God. We do it as extensions of him in the world, and therefore our work is marked by humility and purpose. Merton writes:

To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become His instrument. He works through me… Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God.

In the end, decompartmentalizing our spiritual lives has less to do with making everything about God, than with awakening to the fact that everything is about Him. It is a different way of being that then changes the doing, not the other way around. It is less a different way of doing than a different kind of seeing, seeing through to the reality of God in the everyday. And even if we don’t or can’t see, even if the day is too clamorous or tiring to contemplate anything spiritual at all, it doesn’t change the truth of God’s reality, and even in the following through of our purposes, we can live into the holiness of each space that we occupy, one moment at a time.