Seeing The Sacred Everywhere -Part II
What does it mean to see the sacred everywhere when the world contains so much suffering? Perhaps the sacred is not always what is happening, but what suffering cannot extinguish.
And then there is suffering.
It is relatively easy to speak of seeing the sacred everywhere when we are standing beneath an old tree, watching light move across water, listening to birds in the garden, or sitting quietly beside someone we love. There are moments when the sacred seems almost embarrassingly obvious. The world opens, the boundaries soften, and for a little while we remember that we belong to something immeasurably larger than ourselves.
But everywhere is an enormous word.
If I am going to speak of seeing the sacred everywhere, then sooner or later I have to follow that word into places I would rather not go. Into the hospital room. Into war. Into the life of a frightened child. Into cruelty, abandonment, hunger, loneliness and grief. I cannot speak of the sacred only where the world is beautiful and then fall silent where it is broken.
This does not mean that suffering itself is sacred. I have no wish to make cruelty holy or put some spiritual gloss over the unbearable. Some things should break our hearts. Some things should make us angry. Sometimes the most sacred response available to us is simply to say: this should not be happening.
Perhaps, then, the sacred is not always found in what is happening.
Perhaps it is found in what cannot finally be destroyed by what is happening.
It is there in the immeasurable worth of the person who suffers. In the hand reaching through the rubble for another hand. In the stranger who stays when everyone else has gone. In the person whose heart has been broken and who, astonishingly, remains capable of tenderness. And sometimes there is no heroic gesture at all. There is simply someone breathing through another impossible night.
For me, seeing the sacred everywhere has come to mean refusing to believe that suffering has the final word. It means looking directly at darkness without pretending it is light, while refusing to believe that light has ceased to exist.
Perhaps this is where the sacred becomes hardest to see—and where seeing it matters most.
Not as an explanation.
Not as an answer.
But as the small, almost invisible flame still burning in the darkest room, quietly reminding us that however terrible the night becomes, darkness has never learned how to extinguish love.
Nigel Lott teaandzen.org
Meditation Sans Frontieres 501 (C) 3 Registered Charity Tax EIN 81-3411835
May the work offered here serve peace, serve healing, serve remembrance, and serve the quiet dignity of being alive. May this sanctuary belong not to one person alone, but to the field of life itself.
And may all who encounter it feel, even for a moment, that nothing is missing and they are not alone.
