Our Sense of the Sacred

by Linda A. Dove October 26, 2025

When I was little, my mother knitted two teddy bears for me. I loved them to death. I played with them and wet the bed when I couldn't have them with me to cuddle. Later, mother got rid of my bears without telling me. I was terribly upset. Then, 50 years later, clearing my parents' attic, I came across my teddy bears. I was overjoyed. They're still valuable to me and I don't wet the bed any more. They're valuable but not sacred.

Now bear with me. (Ugh-sorry!)  For this talk, I'm using the idea of the sacred in spiritual and religious contexts. And what we hold sacred is our subjective, personal perception. Holiness we apply to external objects and rituals. For Christians this may be a statue of the Virgin Mary or the rite of baptism.

I'm also going to talk about spirituality. We UUs have an urge to understand what it's all about, what it means, why we're here, why there's any life at all. Some of us have a feeling there's something beyond our tiny selves, be it the ground of being, a transcendental something, or a presence that infuses all living forms. For all of us, spirituality involves a caring state of mind, a reverent attitude to life, and participative way of being in the world. A spiritual approach to our lives can be felt within the institutional religions that most of us grew up with. But there's no reason at all why secular folk cannot also be spiritual.

Now, I'm going to suggest we humans have mostly lost our sense of the sacred. And I'm convinced this matters for the spiritual health of ourselves and our planet. So why do I say this?

Well, for ancient peoples, as you know, the boundary between the material and the spiritual worlds was porous. They took for granted that they were part of the natural world. And they knew they were subordinate to the gods—gods of the sun, the moon, the seasons, the seas, and even the nymphs of the trees. Gods were in a world beyond— though they often messed around in our world for good and for ill. To appease their gods, the ancients used worship, rituals and sacrifice in temples and shrines and other holy places. When the Church took over from early Christianity in the West, people continued to perform rituals like the Eucharist, confession, and festivals like Easter. And right through medieval times and the Renaissance, it was not just the mystics, but ordinary people who had a sense of the sacred.

Our sense of the sacred radically weakened in the 17th. century with the mis-enchantment of the world. Francis Bacon, the English intellectual and scientist, poo-pooed myths, magic and imaginary stories about angels, demons, fairies and spirits. We can only discover truth, Bacon said, by using logic and reason. So scientific evidence became the “third way, " the way to reveal the laws of nature laid down by God. But this worried early scientists and mathematicians since, in practice, they could measure only the material things in our world bounded by time and space and they couldn't see how to measure God. So, this left their reasoning powers in the lurch.

For many people during the 18th. and 19th. centuries, as you know, the industrial revolution cast doubt on whether we even needed a law-giving God. Inventions such as steam engines, factories, electricity convinced us we're not part of the natural world because we “hold dominion” over it. We latched onto Darwinism also, naively interpreting it to imply that we humans will always sit at the top of the tree of life. Many people became secular, some Unitarians among them. Progress via economic growth became the supreme goal. And capitalism twinned with emerging democracies did a lot to reinforce this “progress” ideology. Other "-isms” would also promoted a faith in progress—communism, socialism, fabianism, humanism, feminism, anti-racism and consumerism. These ideologies convinced our reason and logic that we didn't need spirituality or a sense of the sacred. So we “desacralized” the world. G.K. Chesterton, the British author, commented on this, saying humans want to believe in something and so the -isms substitute for a belief in the spiritual.

In the 20th. and 21st. centuries, we've become even more secular. As the Reverend Annie Foerster reminded us recently, we struggle with busyness and to-do lists—school, jobs, child or elder care, technology—you name it! The upshot is many of us feel guilty doing nothing—playing, resting, emptying our minds—let alone taking time to nurture our spiritual health.

In the 19th. and 20th. centuries, many notable people were pioneers trying to deal with this.

• William Yeats, the poet, wrote that we've lost our sense of the sacred and, as Paul Britner also suggested this month, our capacity for awe.

• Carl Jung, the psychiatrist and philosopher, said we feel isolated because we don't see the natural world as sacred and we've separated ourselves from it.

• Existentialists, Albert Camus and Paul Sartre held that individuals and societies are spiritually and culturally lost in anomie—feelings of purposeless and disconnection. When we lose our sense of the sacred, Sartre wrote, we have no idea how to fill our emptiness.

• Teilhard de Chardin, scientist, Jesuit priest and mystic, applied his scientific reasoning to find evidence for his scientific work but he also used his imagination. He wrote that mankind, with the highest form of evolved consciousness so far, ought to take the lead toward the spiritual fulfillment of the world and the cosmos, what he called the omega point.

Today, religious people still perform sacred rites and rituals to acknowledge the holy. But for the most part, as Western secular people, we've downplayed our spiritual search and practices and substituted getting on with the business of everyday life. And business, fixated on the bottom line of profit and loss, has no time for rituals.

Don't you think, then, that this accounts in part for why so many people today feel empty, unhappy, confused, anxious, depressed? I confess, in these troubling and fast-paced times, I often feel depressed amd find it difficult to take time to nurture my spiritual health, let alone cuddle my teddy bears. With all that's going on, is it any wonder that the widespread hopelessness of today's world leads to so much rage and lashing out, so much despair and suicide?

So, to state it philosophically, our modern world is in a right old mess—and that's a real bummer. I contend that this is partly because we no longer have a sense of the sacred. And our neglect of global warming suggests we still think we are not members of the natural world. Unlike the ancients, we no longer imagine we hear the voice of Zeus in thunder and the touch of a muse in music. And we demonize myth and legend—symbolic truths that used to allow us to pass through the thin veil between the visible and invisible.

So  my view is that, to begin clearing up the mess, we need to stop relying solely on our logic and reason and value and use our imaginations more. As I already said, imagination was a big part of life up to the 17th. century when reason took over. But later in the 19th. century it was the transcendentalists who began to revive imagination as a way we can comprehend the kinds of unmeasurable truths that reason can't. Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, wrote that our world is but a canvas for our imaginations. And Einstein took this further. As you know, he said it was his religious imagination, not his reason, that led him to transformative scientific truths—as when he imagined traveling on a light beam and discovered how relativity acts on the material world. Recently, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist's brain research has given us evidence that shows imagination is the important faculty for deep comprehension and insight. while the left brain latches on to information, to facts.

In the West , only a minority of us today carry out spiritual-leaning practices. Some of us peer through a crack in our everyday reality when we go through out-of body, near-death experiences or take psychedelics drugs. After such moments we don't doubt there's an invisible, unmeasurable reality beyond our material existence. Scientists too are beginning to concede there's something beyond the everyday Newtonian laws we live by. Even hard-core cosmologists, physicists and biologists, having discovered the vast, complex cosmos and the tiny, unreal particles of quantum physics, now admit they have a sense of the sacred when they try to imagine what they're dealing with.

So I'm convinced we Western peoples need to value and use our imaginations more in order to deepen our sense of the sacred and enhance our spiritual lives. With reason and imagination scientists are struck by the wonder of the cosmos and all of us can take time to be awed by the holy, artistry of a tapestry, the beauty of a buzzard in flight and the full moon rising on a clear night.

How to begin using our imaginations more? At least three things are important. in my view. And I think you'll agree they seem like just common sense.

• First, our individualism often works against us. We need to get over feeling isolated as individuals or identifying ourselves with tribes often at war with one another. We need to feel we belong in community, locally and worldwide. We need to feel we're interconnected with all life, as our UU principle asserts.

• Second, and related, we need to regain our understanding that we're part of the natural world. We don't need to be tree-huggers, but who hasn't had a walk in the park that calms us down, puts things in perspective. And we don't need necessarily to espouse an institutional religion to revive our sense of the sacred when contempating the trees, the flowers, the sun and galaxies, all life— and death—as sacred.

• Third, and perhaps most important, we mortals need to recover from our anomie and regain meaning and purpose. Lionel Corbett asks us to be grateful for our lives and sense they have meaning—a sense that, when we die, our presence has mattered. And Thomas Berry asks us to be grateful we live in this world. He wrote that we need to use our imaginations to rediscover the mystical while at the same time honoring our material world and its “awesome unfolding” over billions of years.

Many spiritual leaders today offer us ways of regaining our sense of the sacred. The Dalai Llama and the Reverend Matthew Fox, among many others, suggest centering prayer or meditation, not just as tools for reducing our blood pressure, but as serious disciplines that allow our egos to dive from our everyday reality into the deeper spiritual reality underlying everything. Thomas Moore wants us to give time for attentive contemplation, to let our imaginations loose in order to see the world more vividly through the arts—painting, poetry, drama, dance, music, magic—what Moore calls the “re-enchantment of everyday life.“

Today, I do see a few signs that our sense of the sacred may be poking through again in the West. Crowds of tourists visit holy places like cathedrals where they're suffused unexpectedly by something out of the ordinary, call it the spiritual essence of a place. Pilgrimages are popular again in Spain and Italy. I would love to walk the new pilgrimage routes recently set up all across England. And all of us, even secular folk, tread softly and speak with whispered reverence in churches , synagogues, mosques and temples. It's not only Christians who place flowers on graves and scatter the dust of loved ones. And don't we all sense a holy moment, a presence of spirit, when we hold a new-born in our arms, or hold the hand of a human in hospice or say goodbye to a beloved dog as it takes its last breath?

So the conclusion of all this for me, and I hope for you too, is that we humans need, first and foremost, to transform ourselves, our worldview, and our behavior. And we need to do this before we can transform the world for the better through politics, policies, programs, protest, and even street demonstrations. We use our imaginations to enjoy video games, so why can't we enjoy the other dimensions of life's journey and go out on a limb to imagine how we can give muscle to our lost sense of the sacred? If we can cherish all people, all living things, and our planet as holy, might we not become more loving and solve many of the problems of our world? Don't we want to feel our sense of the sacred enfolding us.

So, here is a little poem of mine on how I have a sense of the sacred when I view the natural world as holy.

                                               TIME STILLS

When nighttime swells and spills a star, when full moons slide across the sky, when minutes idle like feathers on calm water, when I stay quiet and open, earthly time stills to eternity for me.

Thank you.