On Sacredness
What does it mean to be revered, a relic, a holy object?
Back in the fall of 2021, I was invited to write a short meditation on the meaning of “sacredness” for a group art show called This Sacred Thing at Pittsburgh’s SPACE Gallery, co-curated by Sam Smith (who, full disclosure, is and was my boyfriend), Ian Brill, and Keith Tassick. I wrote the essay, printed it, and glued it to the gallery’s beaten floor in the spaces where tiles were missing. The show was beautiful and fantastically curated, and it stayed up for several months, and then I never did anything else with the essay—it’s just been sitting quietly in my hard drive for the last three years, a relic. But I found myself thinking of it the other day, and wishing to give it more of a permanent home.
So why not here?
What makes a non-sacred object sacred? (Related: when does a sacred object become unsacred?) It strikes me that for a thing as revered as a revered thing, the lines between “revered” and “unrevered” are awfully blurry. // As a teenager one Halloween I went to a haunted house that my friend’s church had put on. The primary difference between secular haunted houses and the church’s haunted house was that the church imposed a narrative on their haunting, and the narrative went like this: teens who had not accepted Jesus as their savior died in a car crash and woke up to find themselves where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. I was both audience member and participant, both a player in Halloween merriment and the target of the severest of morality tales. I was never sure how I was meant to view the event: as a celebration of horror-as-entertainment or a protest of it. In any case, I was both scared and exhilarated. // This raises the question of intentionality. I cannot believe the church had no intentions, but what they were is unclear. // A sacred thing is, I think, rarely intentional. Rather, it becomes sacred by virtue of its meaning or worth as developed or understood over time. To make an object and then to say, This is a holy thing; it’s purpose is to be holy is laughable. (In a Far Side comic, Gary Larson depicts the golden calf as a little human leg.) // Yet perhaps it isn’t wholly true that a sacred thing is unintentional. Miniature crosses are mass manufactured; many of these are sacred. Perhaps we should say, then, that an object’s sacredness has little to do with how it came to be: a symbol of sacredness may be manufactured, but its sacredness may not. // We might also describe a sacred thing as sincere. Perhaps more precisely, to consider an object as sacred is to regard it with sincerity. Even more precisely, the how of a regard differs from person to person. Of his notorious 1987 photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) depicting a crucifix submerged in his own urine, Andres Serrano said, “I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I’ve been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ.” // A cursory history of the word relic reveals that an archaic form of the word, relict, was once used to describe widows and other people or things that had been abandoned, suggesting that a relic is something that gains value once it has endured loss or once its mettle has been tested. A widow, like a pottery shard, is admired for her sticktoitiveness. Sacredness is an earned thing. // In Japanese tradition, kintsugi is the art of gluing broken pottery shards back together with gold. This idea is centuries old but has become popularized and embraced in the West in the last decade by saccharine viral articles and videos titled “Kintsugi and the Art of Repair” and “How the Japanese Art of Kintsugi Can Help You Deal with Stressful Situations” and “Kintsugi: The Art of Precious Scars.” I write this with some sheepishness (another kintsugi blurb! (and from a white woman, no less)), because I would really like to be cool, and cool people are generally ashamed of sincerity. But despite the currents of trendiness and superficiality that run through these articles, the fact that kintsugi is a trend at all is a testament to the strength of the relic, and the idea that we so cling to that we can be reborn as better than we ever were before, that our scars make us stronger and prettier and wiser. We all want to be better. We all want to be loved. // I want to be better. I want to be loved. // It was when Thomas saw Jesus’s punctured hands that he knew Jesus was a savior. // To be a sacred thing is to be trustworthy: this thing is reliable, this thing is solid, this thing will fight for itself, and for me. // Jesus said, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.” This strikes me as unfair. // In the same way that the quality of sacredness is not simply manufactured, tenderness toward another person or toward a thing is not something instantaneous, but something that grows over time. In this way, sacredness is less the quality owed a person or a thing than the quality of a relationship. // Serrano also said of Piss Christ: “What it symbolizes is the way Christ died: the blood came out of him but so did the piss and the shit. Maybe if Piss Christ upsets you, it’s because it gives some sense of what the crucifixion actually was like.” // There is an element of underdoggedness to many sacred and holy things. We gravitate toward the loser who puts up a good fight; we respect effort, whether the effort is successful or not (recall Grantland Rice: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”). Almost makes you feel bad for the winner. // This raises some questions about the definition of winning. // Related: battle versus war. // Related: the line between abandoned and not abandoned. // Everyone I love has been abandoned by something. // Some winners: pharisees, David, Goliath, God, Jesus. // Some losers: Jesus, David, Goliath, the Virgin Mary. // Of course, in the case of widows and broken pots, there is no distinct winner, is there? A car crash, a knock off a shelf? Time, which comes for us all? // I am no longer religious, but I continue to cling to the notion that ordinary people can be holy, too. // I keep asking what a sacred thing is, but I have not asked what it does. There are rudimentary and obvious answers to this: it inspires, it teaches, it strengthens. But I think if we look at a sacred or holy thing or a relic as a thing that has been humbled or abandoned or has had its mettle tested or that lost once but didn’t stop fighting and rose in grace and power and serenity and is now stronger and wiser or more inspiring than it ever was before, we can see how we, too, may become those things through our turmoil, our tremors, our lonelinesses, our lost battles, our won battles. A sacred thing, a holy person, a relic, is a no-nonsense reminder of what we can survive, and a reminder that we are not alone. // Even Jesus needed friends. // Mary Oliver asks, “Have I endured loneliness with grace?” And that line has been spinning around in my head for years, whenever I feel lonely and beset, which is often. And it occurs to me that maybe that’s it, maybe that’s the difference between a run-of-the-mill loser and a sacred thing: a sacred thing holds grace.