This Week's Conversatio Morum

15 March 2010 

Between Sacred and Profane

By Ronald W. Nikkel

It was early in the season and although the snow was deep, it was loose and fluffy, gently covering the scrubby bush high on the Cape Breton Highlands.  A friend and I had determined to snowshoe across the highlands and down to my home on the shore.  What seemed like a good plan at the outset soon turned into a painful and dangerous nightmare of continually breaking through the thin icy crust into the deep loose snow around the bushes we could not see.  In exhaustion and frustration I cursed the very snow whose beauty I had admired just hours before.  This was absolutely not the excursion into the winter world of nature’s beauty that I had envisioned.

“Damn it!” I swore, struggling heavily to regain my footing on the thin crust.  “I hate this blinking white crap” (or words to that effect), I shouted seconds later, sinking and flailing downward for at least the hundredth time.   Without moving, I cursed the snow, the unseen bushes, my snowshoes, and just about everything else around me.  Frustration and anger expressed in growing profanity obscured the beauty of the day - the joy of adventure, my lust for life, my appreciation for nature, and also my sense of the Creator’s presence within me and around me? 

I did not stop to think of what I was really saying or doing at the time, but in looking back, I see how easily and often I revert into profanity.  It is not yet clear to me why the tendency to curse at inconveniences and failures comes so easily to me.  Yet the profanity of others greatly bothers me, not necessarily because I object, for that would be quite hypocritical, but because it spoils and mars the good space between us.  Often I will laugh to relieve the tension, but it is not something that laughter covers up, and neither can any objection I would voice undo or repair it.   

There are men and women whose ethos of life is profanity in speech and style.  During the past few days I have been listening as several men shared their life stories, their journeys through pain and prison and profanity to, grace and beauty.   Theirs were miraculous stories of redemption, transformation, and restoration – profanity undone by the mercy and love of Jesus, who took their profanity and the profanity of the whole world upon himself to bridge and heal the space between them (us) and the Creator, and between each other. 

The story of Easter is the recapitulation of the story of the Exodus, the redemption and restoration of the people of God, just like us, by grace.  Yet like the Exodus, the story of Easter is marred with human profanity of word and deed.  During this time of Lenten[i] reflection, I have been meditating on two stories within the larger story of Easter.  One is the profanity of Peter,[ii] who, after the third time that someone accused him of being associated with Jesus, let loose with a string of profanity.  In desperate sheer fear, Peter reacted with a string of curses to distance himself from Jesus, yet as soon as the curses left his mouth he realized what he had done.  In the moment of his profanity, Jesus bridged the distance between them with a look of love that caused Peter to break down and weep in awareness that Jesus’ love was more real and sacred than his deepest fear and frustration.

I meditate as well on Jesus’ two fellow prisoners who cringe and cry out in the excruciating cruelty of their final hours.[iii]  Side by side with Jesus, one of them hurls insult upon insult as he takes out his anger fear and suffering on Jesus.  The air is filled with the crass profanity of mocking soldiers and spectators and the bitter defiance of a suffering prisoner.  But the other prisoner realizes that the space between himself and Jesus is a sacred space; instead of profanity he pleads for pardon and reaches out to grace.  With a simple word of welcome, Jesus embraces him within that inhuman tortured space they share.  The most profaned of human experience is transformed by grace. 

There are just two modes of being in the world, two ways of seeing and interacting with life – one is sacred and the other profane.  Profanity is defined by treating something with abuse, irreverence or contempt; debasing or demeaning something or someone through vulgarity.   For many people, the experiences and functions of living are merely an organic physiological phenomenon.  For others, life is, and its experiences are, never merely physiological.  For them, all of life -- all events and experiences -- are endowed with meaning and become a sacrament, a place or space of communion with the sacred.[iv]

I know that there is no dividing line between the sacred and profane.  Everything was created good by God for good.  By profanity we degrade and demean that which is good, the space between us and God, and the good space between each other.  In the resounding echoes of our own profanity, we stand beside Peter looking into the loving eyes of Jesus; in the spasms of our own pain and frustration, we raise our gaze to see Jesus gazing at us with great affection -- suffering with us, embracing us in his sacred innocence, blessing us in the midst of all that life will throw or thrust at us.

Beannacht
("Blessing")

 On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

 And when your eyes 
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

 When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

 May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.[v]

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