March 13, 2009
The Second Half
Recovering the sacred
BY DEACON JIM AND ANN CAVERA
According to a survey released this past Monday by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the number of Americans claiming to practice no formal religion has gone from eight percent in 1990 to 15 percent today. Outranked in numbers only by Catholics and Baptists, the group claiming no religion is now the third largest category surveyed.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to find people who believe some things are holy and worthy of reverence. Holding some things sacred honors the transcendent, protects the best in us and admits some things are beyond our comprehension. Yet even the words we use to describe the sacred: “almighty, holy, ever-lasting” sound off-key in a culture that has an instant fix for anything that happens to be an inconvenience.
Where do we find the sacred today? Marriage? Even the words “For better or worse, till death do us part” have the ring of something from another era. Children often grow up without a sense of identity in homes where family structure is uncertain. Human life? The millions of abortions performed are too painful to even think about. Now, even embryos can be stored and grown for experimental purposes. According to the World Bank, of the children who have been born, 15 million die of hunger every year. We have put ourselves in charge of life and without the wisdom of the sacred the result is chaos.
In the Old Testament reading this week, the Ten Commandments provided a sense of awe for the sacred and structure for daily life to a rag-tag bunch of refugees wandering in the desert. Though the Israelites couldn’t keep the Ten Commandments, they returned to them time after time to recover a sense of who they were. In the gospel reading, the moneychangers and sellers of animals for sacrifice placed personal gain above the deeper need to worship. In a burst of holy anger Christ rid the temple of people who had forgotten how to honor the sacred.
Perhaps the deepest human thirst is a need for an encounter with the transcendent. There are those who point out encounters with the holy can happen at any moment; in a quiet walk in the woods, seeing the glory of a sunrise or sunset, at the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. True, we can experience the presence of something greater than ourselves in unexpected places. Connecting with the holy eases our hearts and brings a sense of peace to our souls. But, faith without the joy of companionship and the comfort of well-loved celebrations is unsupported belief steeped in loneliness.
Recently a young friend wrote that she feels she belongs to a generation that has lost something. What we have lost is a sense of the sacred that anchors our hearts, surrounds us and leads us into something greater than the petty concerns of daily life. Only when we rediscover a sense of the sacred will we recover a sense of ourselves.
Deacon Jim and Ann Cavera are former residents of Evansville; their award-winning column is a regular feature of the Message. Contact them at www.catholicseniorspirit.com.