Sacred

Sacred

Samuel Bird

My parents were raised on either side of the great Teton mountains. In the middle of which, is the towering monolith of the grand Teton, a pinnacle so sheer and protruding, the mind struggles to grasp its reality, leaving one in a tenderly pondering surreal state. I was born to the West of the great mountain and spent my early years there. To the East of it, I spent my years as a young man figuring myself out. I am now back on the West side of this mountain, trying to make a life worth living. Most of my life, at least minus my travels, has been in the shadow. From the cradle, to now, and perhaps to grave, this towering precipice has been off to the side. It has become such a presence to me, that my whole perception of the world is in terms of where I am to it. When I travel I miss it as home. When I adventure, I look to it as my compass. When I am home, I can see it. I can currently see it from my home and have often been late to my profession as I stop to watch the sun’s diffused rays bath the peak in a spectrum of rich hues. There is what this mountain seems to be outside of me. Empirically, young tectonic plates pushed up against each other so violently as to shoot the behemoth up against gravity. Being young, it has not had time to erode down. To the geologist and any respectable academic, it is a massive stone pressed up. However, what it is, and what it is to me are not the same facts. The scientist attempts to step outside of his mind to tell us how the world is, as far as it is synthetically reproducible. The world must consistently fit into quantitative and qualitative data for it to become something to him. For the artist, the world is, instead, what it seems to be for us. They try not just to produce the phenomenon at hand, but what they felt when they observed it. They will downplay this fact and dramatize another, all in an attempt to allow us to see through their eyes the meaning they found. We see here the distinction between what something is, and what something is like to us, only one of which we can know. A good philosopher finds himself with either set of tools. I attempt to know the world as it is, but I know I can only do so in terms of my mind. I can then at points engage with it as accurately as I can, or on the other hand, as exactly what I am, to get different views. Sometimes my explicit literality is my attempt to structure the world in terms of thought. Other times I use prose to tell how my experience is to me. Your discretion and attempts to do either of these will be your success in doing so. 

So then, what is this mountain to me? What does it represent? What role does it play in the story playing out in my head? My attempts to understand the world as a young man led me to be convinced there was no God. This was first a fact to revel in, as I could act smarter than everyone else and had some entertaining vices. However, from the beginning, it was a lament that I professed no God. I could tell that there is an infinitely chasmic hole in the human soul that could only be described as God-sized. This God when in His proper place, filled one role that modernity refuses to have filled, but is emaciated and whithering from want. We yearn for the sacred. In a world of facts, that privileged fact is not one we need to know. It is transcendent and sublime. We stand below it in child-like care, and above it as it girds us up. In my modernly sensible thinking, I had lost out on the chance for something to fill the role of the sacred. I began to restructure my thoughts as a young man after being wrong in so many things. I found out how little I knew. In this skepticism, there was room for mysticism, which could then combat the nihilism and cynicism that made life not worth living. If I didn’t know anything, surely I could not know the divine was or was not. In my honest resignation to facts, July 27th, 2017 I had a first-hand experience with the divine. There are two parts to my life, before and after. I remember as an infant in my religiosity, going to the window and looking up at that mountain that had stood guard over me my entire life. I knew that my God wasn’t in the mountain, or at least not only. Not in literal heresy did I look to it, but as a focal point for this new divine. His temporal-spatiality evaded me, but He did not. That mountain became something more than what it was. It represented what I found then as, “my Father in the horizon.” 

This last week, I was able to climb the summit that rests right below that peak. The last time I did it, I took fifteen men, and only two of us made it up there. We had to hike ten extra miles because a gate was closed on the trail and the snow was deeper than I was tall, so we had to snowshoe. On the way back down, my shoes broke and I had to hike the last five miles barefoot in the ice and stone. The weather was much more opportune this time, though that 14,000-foot elevation sun really did a number on me. Because of the day I hiked it, I saw many people attempting to do so. At first, I was irritated, but why wouldn’t a pilgrimage need company? Everyone I saw was strong and healthy, yet one would pass countless people sprawled out on the ground trying to pump as much of that thin elevation air as they could, into their lungs. As I walked and as much as my thoughts could be louder than my pounding heart, I would think about the sacred. This thing above things that the mind needs to have. It needed its rituals and for some things to have an intrinsic value that we all admired. Things as simple as clothes, food, and places, become something we honored and cherished. This thing could be stained, and that thing could be desecrated, but there were humble little parts of the world that carried that same divine spark we saw in part in us, and fully realized in God. When I stopped to take a break, I pulled out “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger and began to read. That way, my brain could hurt as much as my body. I was so impressed by the categories he could place being that were properly basic, and had a non-arbitrary basis. I loved the ideas and had a little conversation with him as he read. However, I was worried for him. I see value in trying to see the world as it is, but I see detriment in failing to see it as we are. Another holy item held under the microscope to see it is only an item, but that was not the point of the sacred. Martin and my younger self needed to remember we are not rational entirely. We have a need for knowledge, but it can’t be replaced with our need to have a place in the world. We are the beast that bows. If you say that you have found the role we play in the world, and don’t find that we have a place in it, I would tell you to go back to the drawing board. We had all hiked some ten miles and were at the last saddle before the table-mountain. The steep had become steeper and many had stopped to breathe and attempt to wrap their minds around if they could do this. I stopped to breathe at the top and ran into an old friend. He had been married since and had a wonderful little life going. I told him about my latest book. He smiled and started to tell me about the great ascent “It’s worth it, you know. Getting to the top is... well there’s nothing like it. The last bit will kill you, but even if it does, it feels like heaven up there.” I smiled and shook his hand before making my journey to the top. Hand gripped sharp stone and boot kicked into steep walls as I slowly ascended while every muscle in my body tried to rebel. Finally, my face crested the top like the morning sun, to see over the plateauing summit. There it was before me, so magnificent and surreal as to pull me from my mind to be in that moment, and yet to be in my mind as I found it so sacred. I wasn’t here with it, I was here with Him. I was in His hand, held up to His face. Not only was there the divine but there was only so in this moment. I shared the moment with many strangers before their weary bodies led them onward. I was left there at the top of this peak with no others, but not alone. I knelt down on the stone and began to pour out a soul that could barely fit within me. I prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for hope. I prayed for strength. Most importantly and with some wisdom, I prayed for God’s blessing in my life mission. I prayed that my life’s objective would become something He would grant His permission or support. I prayed and talked around it until the breeze had a whisper that told me that He had my blessing before my asking. Imagine this moment with me. My life became more than my vain fighting fate. My entire life became sacred in part. The profane parodies and dissembling deconstruction of the modern age could not find their way into my mind. I thought to my Esse Maxim, that point where the structurally rational met the divine, the greatest value and the greatest fact. My life was breathed with new meaning. My suffering, my want, and my failing were parts that made up a whole greater than myself. Whether these stones around me cared, everything had its role, in the story that God and I co-authored. Above me, a caw, and I looked. Floating on the breeze was a raven, the wisest and most majestic of birds in my estimation. When I have called on God for His angels, perhaps as a sign a bird would soar above me and this moment would be so as well. I blessed God and the role he played in holding together my heart’s shards, before knowing I needed to get back down to the valley where I would live out the divine. On my way down, I met a young man who was right below the last ascent and sprawled out on the ground. He was ready to turn back. With a knowing smile, I reminded him he had done the hardest part, and he was going to have to hike down anyway. He might as well continue on. I didn’t say it, but I knew what I was evangelizing for. In celebration of the last time I walked this path, I took my boots off and hiked down barefoot again. After coming down the steepest of the switchbacks, I heard a voice. “You aren’t wearing shoes? Are you crazy? Well, do you mind if I walk with you, you seem trustworthy?” A voice said before a young lady peeked from behind a rock. “You figure I can’t be crazy in more than one way then?” She had attempted to make the climb and grown violently ill. She was scared and it was getting dark. There were large creatures in the woods and she saw I carried a large gun. She joined me and I made sure she got back safely.

We can’t do this. Every time someone’s mind attempts to place something in a role where we just say that it is sacred, someone feels the jealous need to tear it down. I enjoy being epistemically vigorous, but we are starving the soul to stuff our ego. Follow your thought’s patterns all the way down. See how they come from nothingness. We know nothing more than that we are, that there is, and that we are doing something. All other facts are varying degrees of suppositions. Our exponentially repeating awareness doesn’t need to be a denial of our soul’s needs. The more that my cognition becomes aware of the world and itself, the more that it has to work to create the sacred one step off in the horizon. Do you think I think that mountain was really God? Do you think I haven’t read into its geological history and makeup? Yet, my awareness doesn’t need to curse that thing I am. It is the glory of the divine to be always one step away from detection. Outside of deity, we need some things to just be sacred. The family, the soul, the morality are all things that you would struggle to find value above value in the world, but be a philosopher for a moment. See the world as it is and as you are. See the facts it synthesizes into your brain. See the values you speak into the world. Is a triangle real if there is no actual instance of it in the world? Every picture has breadth to its lines, and yet the idea is consistently reproducible as having its interior angles equaling one hundred and eighty degrees. So is it real if it is only in the mind? Depends on how we define real, but it certainly is something. If every people, independent of each other, makes a divine mythos, makes themselves a part of it, and has family play a role in that, what knowledge does the mind hold that the stones don’t? Modernity has no necessary right or grounding to deny the sacred and affirm the profane. This mountain will be here until possibly there are no more people left. Until it becomes a small mound, the mind is welcome to see it as more than it is. And for me, it is the sentimental familiar reminder of that one mind I will ever be a thought in.