Translating the Sacred

In my old life I spent a large amount of time teaching sacred things. I took words and I made more words about those words. Those truths were contained in black and white. In ink on a page. They could be quantified, they were systematic, they could be made into formulas, ways of living, prescriptions, and commands. They were unchangeable, static, still and unmoving.

Recently I’ve struggled to use words to describe my sacred experiences. When I try to hold them down on a page they wiggle. And if I try to turn them into “shoulds” for others they shrivel up completely. Suddenly what was so alive to me looks dead and distorted. Not the beautiful live thing that meant so much to me. I find my sacred experiences like butterflies, beautiful in the air, but dead when pinned to a page.

In Women Who Run With Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells a story of four rabbis who are taken in a dream to the Seventh Heaven and shown Ezekiel’s Sacred Wheel. They all react differently to this experience. The first rabbi gets lost in the splendor and goes mad, the second denies he has seen anything real at all and  becomes a skeptic, the third becomes obsessed with what he saw, lecturing about the construction of the Wheel and what it means. He spends all his days caught up in talking and teaching about it and in the end betrays his faith.

But the 4th rabbi was a poet. And in response to his sacred vision he write songs. Not about the Wheel but about a dove, and his infant daughter and the stars. And according to the tale, he is the one who lives his life better than before.

As I’m learning to encounter the sacred in new ways, I’m also learning not to grasp it so tightly. Not to attempt to give my manna to someone else. Or to force feed them with what nourishes me. It won’t look the same for others, but what I can do, is take what is entrusted to me and use it as my fuel to make songs about the stars. Songs that maybe, possibly will help point others to their own sacred songs, to their own daily bread and then we can share the sacred together.