What is Sacred?

There is a story my mentor/friend likes to tell about a Sufi mystic, Rābi’a al-Adiwiyah. One day she was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When a passer-by asked her what she was doing, she answered, “I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but for God alone.”

Without our concepts of heaven and hell, anxieties about who’s in and who’s out, we’d be left with learning how to love and accept one another and the Great Mystery that contains us. We’d actually have to see the one we call the other and experience our own sacred otherness reflected back to us. All too often religion teaches that the sacred is beyond or outside of us, a quality or state we must strive for rather than a quality or state we already are.

I’m not here to challenge or change anyone’s tightly held beliefs about heaven, hell, the afterlife, or even God. We each have our own cultural and personal understanding of how these things operate. I am, however, interested in encouraging us to live as if each of us were sacred, as if we could love for love’s sake without fear or pretense.

I wonder if each of us could picture someone with whom we struggle, who we think is just wrong. I wonder if we could imagine that person as holy in their difference. I wonder if we could draw near to that person’s innate dignity and clear the way for it to emerge, if only in our imaginations. Can we get curious about the very best of people instead of eternally exile those we do not understand? I often say to my kids, “You don’t have to like someone in order to love them.” Love is a much more complex, rich notion than our personal feelings about another person. It is able to contain depths and multiple shades of gray. Love honors our sacredness.