Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. O Holy One, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by Thee, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, "How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it. "
~ from MY GRANDFATHER'S BLESSINGS by Rachel Naomi Remen
Home is where the heart is not famished, the eye not starved, the Sacred not banished or desecrated. The Sacred cannot be caught in formulas. It cannot be analyzed, not even in terms of ecology, as beauty cannot be caught in the semantics of esthetics. Fingers pointing toward the Transcendent need no vocabulary, for they do not preach. Beyond the dialects of all religions they witness to a religious attitude toward life itself.
~ from FINGERS POINTING TOWARD THE SACRED by Frederick Franck
May the nourishment of the earth be yours. May the clarity of light be yours. May the fluency of the ocean be yours. May the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work These words around you As an invisible cloak to guard your life.
Suddenly I heard the sound; it was the sacred whispers. The whispers come to me from the land, the sky and the sea, and often they urge me to be still. Above all, the whispers signal change.
… a fire was lit in my heart. My rational doubts and hesitations went up in smoke. My tepid faith, which had become that of the indifferent believer, was rekindled.
I was in front of the flaming bush. I wanted to take off my shoes. It was sacred ground. God was this sacred ground. God was within the entire creation. The entire creation was sacred ground.
~ from CIRCLING TO THE CENTER by Susan M. Tiberghien
I began to think of sacredness as a kind of dialogue between the human spirit and certain designated places. These sites that call forth reverence, awe, humility, and wonder — we make them sacred. It is a way of honoring those feelings in ourselves. And when we hear the songs the places sing, we hear our own most ancient voices.
The contemplation of sacred mountains with their special power to awaken another, deeper way of experiencing reality, opens us to a sense of the sacred in our own homes and communities — a sense that we need to cultivate in order to live in harmony.
