Sacred

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
Last night we lit the havdallah candle and passed the spice box, marking the close of the Sabbath and the entering of a new week. While a beautiful ceremony, this whole notion of marking the sacred and profane is annoying. On the one hand, we invest in a time and space, creating a dualism, on the other hand we come to realize there is no place or time where the Infinite is not. Everything is. Simple.
Yet, here we are, even in Zen, lighting candles, bowing, treating this as somehow invested with meaning and that as not.
Perhaps we must: a sacred life would be a life lived with no automatic pilot. No rest. No letting go. A sacred life would be a life without meaning. When everything is sacred, nothing is.
The very definition of sacred demands a separation of one thing from another, investing holiness through mindful attention.
On the other hand, nothing can be profane as everything matters. Everything is deeply and intimately interconnected. One is many, many is one.
Only when we look to the function of ceremony do we begin to understand. Ceremony does not mark, create, or underscore anything at all. Ceremony invites us to recognize what already is. A mindfulness bell does not create our true home, it invites us to open ourselves to it as it is with us always.
Our place is our heart: wherever we go, there we are. We might consider relaxing into it.

Be well.