Making Sacred

                                            Making Sacred

by Marco M. Pardi

As always, your comments are greatly appreciated.

“Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasures, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes is right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase over his soul.”  Gilbert Murray (1866 – 1957) British scholar, in Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. 1950

When I was young I spent as much time as I could wandering over long untouched fields, stopping to examine plants and stones, especially after a rain.  I was particularly fascinated by quartz, silicon–oxygen tetrahedra.  The second most abundant mineral on Earth after feldspar, it occurs in a variety of forms.  I became aware it had piezoelectric properties, linear electromechanical interaction with no inversion symmetry, but I did not know how to harvest this.

But that was really not my concern.  It was the mineral itself, the mysterious treasure sticking up out of the mud which causes one to pause and say, “Oooh, that’s a good one.”

When several others are already in my pocket, why is this one a good one?  Why do I return the others to the ground and keep this one?  Is one a clearer expression of Gaia than the others?

At the same time I thought of my reaction to people who comment on the weather.  A beautiful day.  A yucky day.  A mess outside.  Dreary.  Ideal.  Wish they were all like this.  Why is one day a keeper and the rest not so?  Gaia is doing what she does.  A beautiful day in the Namib desert, a 1,200 mile stretch along the coast of Namibia where the temperatures range from +120F to 60F and the northern part is locally known as The Skeleton Coast can soon turn into a nightmare of survival. Yet for centuries people have been drawn there to risk their lives in search of the legendary river of gemstone quality diamonds lying in the alluvial gravels fifty feet beneath the sand.

Of course, there are many more accessible places.  I’ve been to several national parks, including the Petrified Forest.  Throughout these parks there are signs admonishing visitors that taking anything from the park is forbidden.  Yet, a visit to the Visitors Center shows that enforcement is unlikely.  Inside the Center is a large bulletin board with letters from people who returned stones to the park, claiming they had suffered all manner of calamities after getting home with their ill gotten treasures.  Perhaps these were calamity prone people who imputed their troubles to some magical – sacred property in the stones.  Perhaps these were the writings of first year Park Rangers performing their “other duties as assigned”.  Of course, the Gift Shops always had a stock of stones for sale, presumably exorcised of any vindictive intent.  But buying a stone someone else found is just not the same as the discovery of one’s own.

Early in my teaching career a student, who became a very good friend, brought me a small piece of metal he had fabricated into an amulet of sorts.  He knew of the Bible Belt hostility toward me and in his concern said I should keep this with me at all times.

The object certainly showed dedicated workmanship, but beyond the fact of it being a gift from a well intentioned friend (I ascertained it was not a tracking device) I could not identify with it in any way.  I put it with other things in my home, and lost track of it decades ago.  Considering some of the hard knocks since then, perhaps I should have listened.  But when the Catholic Church decommissioned St. Christopher as the patron of travelers I wondered if masses of drivers suddenly found themselves lost on the highways.  Imagine the chaos.  Can we canonize GPS?

Speaking of travel, it is interesting how place names acquire a kind of sanctity.  Many people would trade their mother’s soul for a degree from Oxford or Cambridge.  Indeed, even a visit leaves one in quiet and respectful awe.  But Oxford, sited near the confluence of the Cherwell and Thames rivers, was just what it says: a safe place to ford the oxen across.  A village arose at this point, called itself Oxford, and later hosted a university.  Cambridge is a similar site, a village arising at the point where a bridge crosses the river Cam.  I doubt many people in the U.S. would treasure a degree from Cattle Crossing University, or Overpass U.  Just not the same cachet.

Driving southeast from Berlin one comes to a rise in elevation topped by a scenic wald; German: wald. wood(s).  A beautiful place where the predominant species of tree is the buchen; German: buchen. beech.  Hence the name Buchenwald.  But for all its serene beauty, who can forget what site is preserved within?  Yes, where Germans conducted horrendous “medical” experiments throughout the years of WWII, failing to entirely cremate their physical results and their carefully documented records.  I said Germans, not Nazis.  To say Nazis is to perpetuate the myth that only a select portion of the population sanctioned these atrocities.  Since Germans generally look so much like the U.S. population, especially after the war, media and textbooks were quick to claim “not all Germans were Nazis”.  True enough, but no such qualifiers are used for the Japanese, many of whom risked punishment or even death from the Kempeitai, the Secret Police, as they listened to American broadcasts on their radios.  And, it was the Italians, not the Allies, who overthrew Mussolini.  But America loves the lie that Italians were all Fascists who “switched sides” when the going got tough.  Sacred myths.

A recent article states the Wailing Wall, claimed as the last standing remnant of Herod’s temple, is actually the wall of the Roman Fort Antonia, built to garrison the soldiers who oversaw the Jews and eventually had to crush their revolt.  A little research shows this has been known for years. Yet, people daily come to pray and to insert written prayers into the crevices (taken away nightly and probably burned).  For these people the myth has become incarnate; it is a sacred object.  Ultimately, what difference does it make if it’s the temple wall, the garrison wall or the wall from which Humpty Dumpty surveyed his last horizon? The importance is solely what is invested in it: sacredness.

In the same vein, the last 150+ years of biblical scholarship have clearly and unequivocally shown the Jesus made sacred by Christians is wholly an invention of Paul, a person who never laid eyes on him and was roundly condemned by Jesus’ followers in Israel.  Hundreds of intensely academic texts, of which I have a couple of dozen including the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, have been written on this.  But, being academic, they seldom if ever appear on Best Seller lists.  Thus, the Christian churches of all denominations are free to go on their way knowing the congregations will likely never encounter these findings.

A book which did cause a minor uproar was ZEALOT: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan.  True to its agenda, FOX News viciously attacked Aslan because he was Muslim, and therefore in their eyes could not possibly know what he was talking about.  However, using all available resources and his intimate knowledge of the cultures involved Aslan gives us a rational, measured and immensely readable presentation of Jesus, as a reformist zealot Jew who would have recoiled at the formation of a new religion, especially in his name. He deconstructs the legendary Jesus and gives us the man; he clearly demonstrates how the legendary attributes, “history”, and claims ascribed to him were highly improbable or outright impossible.

So why the anger in some quarters?  Why would one not want to know the rational and contextual construction of such a man?  Anyway, if a system of thought is valid, Christianity in this case, why must it be grounded in historicity?  True history provides knowledge; false history provides myth.

It appears there is far more at work here than simply the individual’s investiture of sacredness in this mythical figure; there is a world-wide conglomerate with heavily vested interests.

Decades ago I learned from my law enforcement and mental health colleagues that a person can be crazy as a box of gerbils in his own home so long as he poses no threat to self or others.  I think the same principle should apply to those who, in the privacy of their own minds invest sacredness in the object of their choosing.  The question then becomes: What constitutes a threat to self or others?

I have examined this question in a much earlier piece, When Fantasy Becomes Law.  Indeed, since that writing several U. S. States have moved deeper into Draconian laws based on what they seem to think is “Christianity”.  The upcoming Presidential elections are sure to stir this brew further.

Today I know more about quartz than I did as a child.  But walking in the yard after a rain I can still feel the thrill, and can still find myself saying, “Oooh, that’s a good one.”