Sacred

I was driving home from work, thinking about the meeting points of spirit and body that we practice: rituals of burning incense smoke and watery baptisms, bloody burnt offerings, alters and crosses, wedding rings, and gravestones, wine blood and bread body, the Holiest of Holies, not beyond this point.

And I thought that of course sometimes, words are just words, and rituals, empty - when they live themselves out into lies, or inaction, instead of the meanings that they were intended to represent. But sometimes, they lead us through doorways of holiness: into a reality that is ever present, but difficult to enter because of its damn invisibility and propensity to be forgotten. Sometimes, spirit collides with body.

I remembered that there is God in human form. There are Jesus' arms and ribs, heart, lungs, hands, hanging on a cross, right up there with his soul: redeeming all this skin of ours, stitching the holy to the unholy, and grafting our souls to his, through ancient ritual of sacrifice, through body, through blood.
I thought of how I walk along on clay feet, and sometimes, bare skin touches holy ground, and God travels up my limbs to the end of fingertips and nose, shooting out the top of my head like so much static electricity. Clay made holy.

And I realized that this is all we've got. Handfuls of chanting words, rising smoke, sweating bodies. And with this, we make that stretch and are reached by God. The ridiculousness of God in my skin makes it prickle.

And then I knew: throw out the boundary lines. Live in the space of no man's land. Because now, either nothing is sacred, or everything is.