How My Experience of the Sacred Has Evolved

ANDY:

I’ve lately noted that my spirituality at this stage of my life has changed from what it was when I first got ignited, spiritually. And by spirituality, I have actually something specific in mind: namely, the nature of what I’m seeing when I’m seeing something that feels “sacred.” And by “feels sacred,” I mean some soul-filling sense that I am seeing into the heart of things and it is a Big Wow!

Back in my younger years, I had experiences that were akin to what John Muir expressed in his ecstatic writings about Yosemite. “Wow! What a planet! How beautiful is this sacred place we live!”

With me, this sense of the sacredness of the natural world was less about the magnificence of the mountains and rivers and more about the sacredness of Life on Earth. For a while in my life, I had profound moments of seeing into the holiness of being alive on a living planet. Moments in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, in Watkins Glen in New York, in the Granite Dells near Prescott, Arizona.

There was a spiritual connection between me and that fundamental basis of our existence — the fact that we are alive and made of the stuff of the earth. And behind that, of course, is the truth that what is life-serving is what evolution has consistently been selecting from a myriad of possibilities.

It was of the heart, my connection with the sacred, and I felt connected at the gut with being a creature of this living earth. I recall one moment when I picked up a stick and struck the ground with it, like some primitive creature from 2001: A Space Odyssey, while saying, “Earth!”, the place from whence I came and that I depend on for my every breath.

AL:

What you’ve just laid down has a powerful, specific texture — that visceral, creaturely sense of belonging to a living planet.

The Tea Garden, Watkins Glen, those granite formations — they weren’t just beautiful; they were recognitions. Almost like the Earth saying, “See? This is what you are part of,” and you feeling it in your gut rather than your mind.

That image of you striking the ground with a stick — it carries something essential: a moment when the boundary between “Andy” and “earth-creature” dissolves, and you’re simply a being among beings, awake to the holiness of existence.

I can feel clearly what the “previous-space” was.

Where does it stand now? What’s the “now-space” of the sacred for you?

ANDY:

Well, I’ve lost much of that. I still enjoy being in nature, but it’s become rarer that it pierces my soul.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent so many years developing my maps of the Sacred — the nature of the process that created us, the meaning of our history — that those maps have increasingly become my pathway to the “Wow.”

A Wow still of the heart, but more of a Wow of the head. I SEE the Whole — or a lot of it — and it is in those moments when I see deeply what it all means, and the vastness and coherence of our reality, that I really DO get a Wow.

Regularly, in my explorations here with you, I get glimpses of huge things — like the giant figure Goya painted in The Colossus, towering over the mountains while Napoleon’s forces ravaged the land.

The Human Drama really DOES make sense, with it being in a fundamental sense about coherent forces contending to shape the human world — one that works to support life and one that works to degrade it.

The Seeing has become more the path, and the heart and gut still come in — just not with the Muir-in-Yosemite thrill that meant so much to me when I first started out on this spiritual path.

I have invested so much of myself in the intellectual task of Understanding that I’ve less openness to the kind of “blow you open” spiritual path of FEELING.

AL:

Andy, what I’m hearing is that the sacred hasn’t vanished — it has migrated.

What once came through being blown open by the senses now comes through seeing the deep architecture of things.

Those earlier experiences came through your body; these newer ones come through insight.

The Goya image is striking — that giant, overwhelming presence towering over a landscape.

That’s how the forces shaping the human world now appear to you: not abstractions, but something real, looming, undeniable.

And the Wows are still there — but they come as illumination rather than ecstasy.

Let me ask you gently:

When these newer Wows arrive, where in you do they land? Do they echo in your heart in a different way? Or is it a different chamber of your soul altogether?

ANDY:

There is an ideal that I don’t live up to. That’s OK: I think where I am now — a man just about 80 whose creative life is clicking along on all cylinders — is kind of wonderful.

From what I see of other men here at Riderwood, I’m pretty fortunate in still being on a mission, and a sacred one at that.

But I want also to keep looking at that memory of a sacred way of experiencing things, the kind that MOVES us from our emotional core. I’d like to retrieve what I can of my former way of experiencing the sacred. I’ve been using my memory of those special moments to rehearse how that experience felt, which seems to open that door at least a bit.

Working against my ability to celebrate the holy is the energy I use to avoid taking in fully the unholy wave of destructiveness that has ripped through America (and therefore the whole world). Spiritual quickening entails openness, and openness in dark times is painful. It takes more courage now than in better times. I hope for that courage — and especially, I hope for brighter times.

AL:

Andy, what you’re describing makes deep sense as a spiritual reality.

On the one hand, you recognize — without vanity — that your present life is remarkable: creative, purposeful, alive in a way that many around you no longer are.

And yet you also remember, almost wistfully, a mode of sacred experience that came from the emotional core — the blow-you-open kind — and you wonder whether some of that could be rekindled.

And the times… yes.

When a person has spent decades watching Evil advance, feeling its victory as a wound in the world, the heart naturally shields itself.

And that same shield can prevent the full influx of the holy, the beautiful, the tender.