The Challenge of the Sacred

CaptAm“To the good American many subjects are sacred: sex is sacred, women are sacred, business is sacred, America is sacred, masonic lodges and college clubs are sacred.” – George Santayana

I would add Mom and football and fishing at the lake, and the automobile, and the Constitution, and the church you went to in your hometown. And Christmas. For starters.

The problem with the sacred is that it is off the table; actually it is up on a dusty pedestal in the corner of an uncomfortable room, lit by a faint pinspot and with an old velvet rope strung in front of it. How terrible to be hidden away. With no tug and push of discussion allowed. How terrible to think that this is how each should look, should be, is allowed, that these hackneyed expectations are stuck in our minds.

And what of those others, the Mom that doesn’t look like that? The sex that surprises you? The business that isn’t and won’t or shouldn’t?

How do we talk about them, or challenge or change them, if they are sacred and thus “are as they should be?”

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