An exploration of what it means in God’s world to distinguish between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ will contribute to understanding what it means to a PSW to engage in “seeking … God in God’s world”, as one of the interviewees put it. In the saeculum,
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the civitas terrena and the civitas Dei cannot be separated, so the ‘secular’, meaning ‘of this age’, and the ‘sacred’ cannot be separated either. The opposite of ‘sacred’ should therefore be ‘profane’, meaning ‘outside the temple’ (cf. Japhet, 1998, p. 62) rather than ‘secular’.
The fundamental intertwining of the sacred with the everyday is illustrated by a diary entry of Etty Hillesum, a Jew from a non-religious family in Amsterdam, who died at the age of 29 in Auschwitz. She wrote about finding herself “suddenly … kneeling on the brown coconut matting in the bathroom, my head hidden in my dressing gown, which was slung over the broken cane chair” (Woodhouse, 2009, pp. 40-41). For her, this was a source of embarrassment, “because of the critical, rational, atheistic bit that is part of me as well”, and yet “every so often I have a great urge to kneel down with my face in my hands and in this way to find some peace and to listen to that hidden source within me”. Sacred moments can happen in the most unlikely places, not least in places normally deemed ‘secular’. In a recent Church Times article, Poole (2018, p. 16) wrote: “Because God made the world, and Christ redeemed it, there can be no secularity”, using the examples of St Paul and the Unknown God at the
Areopagus (Acts 17.16-34), the “rebranding” of Eostre as Easter, and “the conversion of the goddess Brigid to a saint” to illustrate “the Christian tradition of baptising the secular to claim it for God”.
The existence of ‘a secular’ which needs baptising in order to claim it for God
suggests, however, that, rather than there being no secularity, the distinction between sacred and secular needs further exploration. Early in the 20th century, Otto (1959)
coined the word ‘numinous’ from the Latin numen indicating the divine (presence, will), asserting that ‘numinous’ cannot be strictly defined, as it is an “absolutely primary and elementary datum” (p. 21), but it can be experienced (p. 25). The numinous is wholly other, not to be reduced to anything else, but is simultaneously mysterious, terrifying and fascinating (pp. 39-49). Following Otto, Eliade (1959, p. 20), claimed that the experience of holy ground means that space is not
homogeneous, and that there is on the one hand sacred space, which is “a strong, significant space”, and on the other, spaces which “are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency” and are “amorphous”. He contrasted sacred space, which provides “orientation in the chaos of homogeneity” with profane space, which is entirely relative (p. 23).
Lynch critiqued theories such as Eliade’s on the grounds that they tend to result in reductive explanations of phenomena, often not distinguishing adequately between sacred and religious, and consequently do not provide for the many forms which the sacred can take in human experience (Lynch, 2012, pp.16-17). In recognising as
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sacred what someone, in a particular place at a particular time, deems sacred, Lynch replaced a priori conceptualisations of the sacred with a contextual approach. This need not be purely individual: Lynch (p. 133) described what he called a “cultural approach” as a means of communicating human experience of the transcendent through “specific symbols, … patterns of thought, emotions, and actions grounded in the body, which recursively reproduce the sacrality of that particular sacred form”, and which then draw people together in collective experience.
By the end of the 20th century, it was common, in the secular west at least, to assert
that an object or place is not sacred in and of itself, as Eliade claimed, but is sacred only if someone claims that for it (cf. Durkheim, for whom “the sacred is produced by human activities”, Crockford, 2017, p. 96). This is indicative of a post-modern
tendency to minimise, ignore or refute any claims for absolutes, which, Orsi (2005, p. 12) claimed, results in a “deep antipathy between modern cultures all over the world and the practice and experience of sacred presence”. Such antipathy allows what is sacred in people’s lives to be deliberately ignored, with sacred stories rejected as a framework through which they can tell their own stories. Orsi illustrated this in his account of going into an Italian Catholic community in the USA, similar to that in which he had been brought up, to study the phenomenon of prayer to St Jude. Initially, he congratulated himself on being there to listen to people’s stories, but soon found himself wondering how much “these people” actually cared what he thought of their stories or their spirituality (pp. 147-148). Eventually he was challenged by a worshipper: “Have you even prayed to Saint Jude?” (p. 148, original italics), because if not, how could he understand?
Orsi found himself caught between a world which he thought he understood, but of which he was no longer a part, and the academic world which wanted to liberate people from regressive, dependent views. He argued that such notions of liberation misunderstand the nature of religion, which is not about finding meaning, but about the relationship between heaven and earth, expressed through practices like that of praying to St Jude (p. 150). This is similar to Walton’s (2015) argument that spiritual life writing is a means of reclaiming an ancient practice, referencing Augustine’s Confessions, for new purposes. “An embodied and relational self does not seek to life [sic] itself beyond this messy, complicated world, but rather seeks to adore the sacred within its blemished beauty”, (p. 20) because “the sacred [is] incarnate within the particular, the intimate and the domestic” (p.25).
Where Eliade had focused on sacred space, claiming that the church marks the boundary between sacred and profane, Markus (1970), basing his analysis on Augustine’s concept of the saeculum, saw time as more fundamental, defining
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“sacred history as the story of God’s saving work, secular history as all the rest, all that is left, so to speak, when we subtract from history the strand singled out as ‘sacred’” (p. 11). In the saeculum, “we must be content with the provisional, the ultimately ambiguous, the ‘secular’; for the ultimates are here inextricably intertwined, and must not be prematurely unravelled” (p. 173). The church is thus as sacred or profane as the world, because both are ‘secular’, meaning ‘of this age’, prior to the eschaton. Because the civitas Dei exists both within and without the church, God’s work in the world is only partly carried out in the church, so while the church
proclaims God’s kingdom, it is not that kingdom, and cannot grow into that kingdom of itself. Here the church is very much part of this age, rather than being seen as the threshold between this age and the age to come.
Williams claimed that living a religious life is not about being spiritual, but is a life in which God is acknowledged, and in which a narrative in which God appears is acceptable among other narratives (Williams, 2012, p. 319). The church is then the body of people who celebrate the God who has revealed Godself to them in the person of Jesus Christ, and who, in so doing, makes present a space called the kingdom of God (pp. 92-93). A secular space is one in which such narratives are not accepted, and which will not privilege any “authority that is not accountable to
ordinary processes of reasoning and evidence” (p. 2); it is a space in which nothing is “beyond challenge and critique” (p. 23). For Williams, the difference between
understanding an event as sacred or secular then depends on whether we interpret it functionally – what you see is what you get – or whether we are prepared to allow that there may be more to it than what we currently perceive or understand (so art, for instance, is not secular and is always more than its creator intended, p. 13). In a functionalist world-view, there is no need for a religious register at all; there is, however, the danger of losing any sense that people and things can exist for what they are in themselves, and so are more than the means to an end (p. 92).
I use ‘secular’ in PSW to qualify the work the PSW does which is outside the institutional church, but I also claim that the PSW’s ‘secular work’ contributes to the missio Dei (chapter 9). The church, in its earthly form in this age, is both sacred and secular: it is the body of Christ, but also a human institution. Eliade (1959, p. 25) conceptualised the church as the threshold between this age and the next, the gate- keeper in effect, and as a sacred space open to heaven, symbolised by Jacob’s ladder (p. 26, cf. Genesis 28.12-19). This metaphor acknowledges that the church is both connected to earth, and connected to heaven. While I feel this metaphor does carry some weight, I find Williams’ argument (2012, p. 306), that the church “is … the trustee of a vision”, one, however, by which it “cannot begin to claim that it
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consistently lives”, more persuasive. In this age, the perfection that Eliade’s metaphor suggests is not possible, and so the church’s vocation is to notice and proclaim God’s presence in the here and now. This is discussed, as an aspect of the vocation of the PSW, in section 7.3.