A recent story about NBC pulling the plug on a Maddona video scene in which she mounts a cross triggered a bit of reflection on culture, freedom, and a sense of the sacred. It was similar in a way to cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed that stirred up violence in the Muslim world. In retaliation, one Muslim museum sponsored a cartoon contest on the Holocaust, which struck me as repugnant while the Prophet cartoons did not.

I’ve struggled with this quite a bit during my life. I have a scientific bent. Science has a stellar track record is demolishing sacred cows. It has systematically destroyed our myths about who we are, what our importance is, and our place in the universe. Now it threatens to define life itself as nothing more than DNA strips to be manipulated at will by those with its tools in hand.

I eventually grew to have little regard for the myths that I was told as a kid, primarily because I was sold a bill a goods when I accepted them as reality. As truth permeated my thinking, the wonder drained from the virgin birth, the resurrection, and all the officious sacraments that accompanied it. They seemed pitifully warped ignorance, these remnants of pagan sacrifice, the ritual of drinking of God’s blood and eating his flesh, and the fiction that transubstantiation occurred though no scientific test could detect it. These myths were interspersed with dubious cultural sexual mores, that while supporting the social needs of stability, were as shaky as the bogus scripture they were supposedly founded on.

And this disillusionment has persisted, even when I decided to become a Buddhist. The ceremonial aspects of practice have seemed quaint echoes of a distant culture that have value only for the naive, particularly since there is not any Western cultural resonance associated with them. The statues are not beautiful to Western eyes; the rituals seem Japanese, though a deliberate attempt has been made to Westernize them. I’ve tried to intellectualize them as a means of accepting them as part of my practice. When I bow to the statue of the Buddha, I’m really bowing to my own Buddha nature. When I offer incense, I’m …. I forget at the moment how I’m rationalizing that. For those reasons I do not have a Buddhist altar in my home where I meditate. I light a stick of incense to time the meditation, and its slowly dropped ashes seem symbolic of what life and meditation is about. In that context it’s helpful.

Economic forces and even democratic cultural forces have supported this retreat of the sacred. Economic prowess, with science as its engine, has dominated the cultural landscape of American during the last two decades. Whatever is profitable is also right. And whatever marketing engines can sell is a good that should never be denied. Our cultural value of freedom of speech has mowed down any resistance to destruction of our sense of the sacred. The ‘hos’ and ‘bitches’ of popular rap music have only been resisted by the feeble, nonintellectual whining of religious fundamentalists. Sexual activity is now only an amusement, and primarily self-amusement. It’s only a pleasurable biological function whose normal consequences can be precluded or aborted at will. And if those options don’t work, abandonment will; a compassionate society is morally obligated to provide for those circumstances.

A now defunct Buddhist blog once described an experience at an Episcopal Compline. A Compline is a service at the end of the day, often containing psalms, short liturgies, and the final prayers of the day. This particular entry described his experience in touching the divine there for a few moments, a bit to his surprise, if I remember correctly. To this day, there are some few Christian hymns that seem to touch my soul. So I understood his frame of reference.

What I’ve come to think or see relatively recently is that in eschewing the mythology surrounding religions, I probably also threw out something important. Hidden in among all the dirty bath water was the sense of the sacred. I didn’t see that the artificiality and contrivance of the means to touch the divine were insignificant compared to the importance of occasionally touching it. It is this lack of ability to touch the sacred in our modern culture that is at least partially responsible for some of our political and cultural suffering. I believe adamantly in political freedom, and the free expression of ideas. But I believe in the sacred, and the hallowed too.

I will never agree with the political evil of the Christian right. I have to restrain myself sometimes from ridiculing poor reasoning behind what they say, and animosity toward them as they undertake evil as a result of their deliberate ignorance. I can’t accept their beliefs with some sort of liberal pluralistic platitude that all paths lead to the same place; they don’t. I can’t pretend with them that their religion makes sense; in many ways it does not. I don’t believe the Bible is THE word of God, nor in the eternal hell or heaven they cling to as hope and threat. And the possibility of gaining meaning from Christian ritual is probably irrecoverably lost. And yet today, I understand them better than a few years ago. Their concerns about the sacredness of life are well covered in religious gibberish about abortion, drugs, creationism, sexuality, and cloning. But the underlying concern is about the loss of the sacred in our culture, and that concern is valid.

Even in looking at Christianity, a recent survey showed a marked increase in the charismatic approach to Christianity. To me, it’s not surprising. The old religious forms are cracking; they no longer help people reach the sacred, particularly when it is under siege during daily life. The charismatic movement is a more potent form of engaging people’s emotions in their attempt to regain connection with what’s been lost.

Our culture as a whole can benefit from regaining a connection to the sacred. I’m not talking a Buddhist sacred, a Christian sacred, etc.; agnostics, atheists, and even the secular scientific community often have a deep sense of the sacred as well, though it is not articulated in religious terms. (I won’t quote Einstein here, even though, as someone pointed out, quoting Einstein is a good means of ensuring that others won’t disagree with you.) We need sacred space in our culture. We need space where people can connect to the sacred without being ridiculed or belittled. We need, as much as we can, even within a free society to respect the attempt to reach the sacred, and to support it without either resorting to specific religiosity or patriotism. We need to respect the sacred in language, in art, and what we buy. We need to resist the blatantly profane when it is used to gain attention. We need to openly reject language that dehumanizes others or life itself – whether or not that dehumanization is the demonization accompanying war or the ‘hos’ and ‘bitches’ of hip hop. And without passing new laws, we need to resist those who, like Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, deliberately destroy the opportunity for sacredness, even during moments of dealing with death and loss.

This connection to the sacred is something of value. It is something I’m actively working on in my own life for the next few months.