A few years back Jeff Sartain kindly brought me in to speak at the University of Houston at Victoria. I’d never been to that stretch of South Texas, down near the Gulf. The air was atmospheric and humid. The landscape was beautiful and strange, marked by oil and gas production, wetlands, tall grasses and shorebirds in an uneasy mix of industry and the surviving natural world.
There, in the city I saw an incredible level of community support for events of all kinds. People who seemed to be mostly retired showed up for my reading, bought books without hesitating and called out to each other across the milling crowd, “Nine! I have nine events!” Others held up their fingers to flash silent numbers across the room, using both hands and then sometimes using them again, Thirteen! They gestured, ten! Or, nearly apologetically, they mouthed, Only five, tonight! (Shrug!)
Supporting events was a collaborative effort or a competitive sport, I’m not sure which. There were people throwing out the first pitch at a high school game then hosting a harpist, judging a bake-off and dropping by a bookstore for poetry before bidding on a painting; it was hard to follow it all. The city seemed to be living a nightly highlight reel.
When I go out, I’ll head to one event where I’ll find a corner or a back row, listen to the speaker, the music, browse the books or art and stay until it is over. But I saw the beauty in this practice of swinging by, dropping in, ducking out—goals!
Lately, I’ve been sticking close to home, watching Grey’s Anatomy reruns with my daughter, eating pizza, laughing at our crazy pets in their various destructive pursuits, and talking about everything—which might just be the best, really? I’m happy, right there—here—at home.
Still, last week I turned away from Grey’s Anatomy and went out to see Patti Smith promote her new work, Book of Days. From the ornate stage of Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Patti Smith started out by saying, “…I’ve been watching too many Grey’s Anatomy reruns,” and I laughed out loud, because that tossed-off moment veered toward surreal, as though speaking directly to me. It was so…human.
The night before, I’d been to my dear friend Erin Ergenbright’s spelling bee at Portland’s Mississippi Pizza. I swung by, in the spirit of making it to more than one event in a night, the spirit of being present if even only for an hour, to say hello, listen and laugh, see lovely people, and perhaps, once in a while, even spell a few words on stage—and maybe, just maybe, spell them right. (Hey—I won a t-shirt! In the raffle!)
At the spelling bee, an interesting word came up: Sacramentalist. It means, apparently, one who adheres to sacramentalism, investing belief in the sacraments as practiced in the Catholic Church or the Orthodox church. It’s a belief in rites, rituals and objects, a belief in baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, marriage and the rest of a short list. The sacraments are seen as physical and material, while also imbued with a spiritual meaning larger than the objects, word and gestures.
If you’ve taken craft seminars from me, you know we talk about the way objects carry emotion, carry meaning. Meaning always is larger than materiality, isn’t it?
Because it is religion, of course there are debates, factions, rival belief systems and fantasies. Apparently, the sacraments are called the “mysteries,” in the Orthodox church, and the Puritans took that fun down a fat notch, marketing them as the “ordinances.” There’s more to it and I’m abbreviating. Some of you probably know these troubled waters far better than I do. Apologies for any shorthand. I’m less interested in looking at divisions among the belief systems of competing organized religions which have, too often, been used to inflict nightmarish levels of harm.
I’m interested in the essential idea of what humans consider sacred versus profane.
Profanity always seems to involve hierarchy, pointing toward “base” language, and roping in the body, sex acts, excrement rather than sacrament.
“Sacred” and “sacraments” share a root in Latin, sacrare, or to consecrate. They share a root with “sanctify.” Roman soldiers were sanctified, set apart, said to be better than others, because…well, they were soldiers. For Rome. They were giving their lives to help consolidate power.
What would it mean if we jimmied loose the essential idea of the sacraments and created our own sacred rites, over and over again, always making our individual belief systems generous, kind and new?
James Joyce made the Catholic term “epiphany” his own; he took it off its hinges and moved it from the church into the world of literature and now it’s used perhaps too readily. People have career epiphanies and Taco Bell epiphanies…it’s used to mean any idea shift or dawning awareness. But Joyce used it in a profound way, linked to yet distinctly severed from the Catholic church, as a “sudden spiritual outpouring, whether in the vulgarity of word or gesture or in a memorable aspect of the mind itself…” His character Stephen Hero saw epiphanies as “the only things worth saving from the wreck of time."
If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred. Walt Whitman wrote those words in “I Sing the Body Electric.” His words come to me as I work out or walk, and again as I navigate a maze of hospital halls, as I take care of myself and those I love. I do my best, which is perhaps so very little in the face of mortality, and I think of Whitman. How do we hold each other together?
Grey’s Anatomy is also about the mysteries and primacy of the human body. It’s about ways the human body can fail, and how we can—or can’t—put each other back together, over and over again, in community. It’s about the erudite and the base, education, sex, love, high hopes, bitter though fleeting rivalries and salvation.
If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred, and that human body fails us, and it carries us.
An audience member asked Patti Smith about her religious beliefs. “I believe in it all,” she said. “I believe in belief.”
Writing is in conversation with the other arts and the world of ideas. Being in community is about retaining humanity. I’m going out, to hear words, see paintings, watch plays. I’m staying in, to connect with family.
How are you?
Thanks for reading, and I love it when you comment!
Stay sacred, Pony Keg. Or something like that! Cheers, and again, thank you.
Keep going,
M
I was raised Catholic but have morphed into an agnostic. Oddly, I'm drawn to learning about other religious traditions and their connections to the great questions. (Where we came from? Why are we here? What is evil? etc.) So in a way I'm like Patti Smith when she said “I believe in it all. I believe in belief.” In the last year, in my retirement, I've accelerated my learning about writing and writers. FOr me, it is world akin to a a religion where each is striving and serving a greater purpose. A purpose that is difficult to define, and yet fulfilling to pursue. I'm always one sentence (or conversation) away from unveiling a mystery. A treasure hunt of the divine as it were.
Sorry about getting to philosophical. haha (I like your piece above. Thanks for sharing.)
It came to him there on the beach. Yes, thought Stephen Dedalus. He would venture forth, out into the world, and he would eat Taco Bell.