It’s all F-ing Sacred

When I had the realization that it’s ALL F-ing sacred, I had just been fired from a beloved teaching job and was struggling trying to figure out why it happened and where I was being led.

Surely God had cleverly cast my principal in the role of Judas in the ever unfolding legend of my life to teach me the hard lessons of what I felt was a “betrayal”

What I know now, that I could only grasp a sense of then, was that this incident was the final nail in the crucifixion of my heart.

It was what prompted about a two year long identity crisis, one where I would often catch myself gazing into the bathroom mirror asking the age old question “Who AM I?”

When I had this revelation, my friend Jake, a spiritual elder in the Navajo tribe, a healer and medicine man had come to my home in the Quaker Intentional Community where I was living to pray for me.

I was lost, unsure of where life was leading and questioning if I had any control or part to play in leading my own life.

We climbed the ladder in my bedroom and we sat in the loft that had become my sacred sanctuary. He opened his medicine box filled with feathers, tobacco, and other sacred objects and we began to pray.

With the soothing rhythms of letters and sounds in a language I didn’t know with my mind, but could feel with my heart, the tears began to stream down my face, and the prayers began to fill in the grooves of my broken heart.

They were a reminder of the unraveling that had begun the year prior when I placed my wedding ring on that sacred mound in front of Jake’s sweat lodge and the prayer I made for “the highest good of all involved”

As we continued to pray in the way in which his elders taught him, I slowly began to feel that there was perhaps more help and guidance in the unseen world in which my ancestors resided than the seen world of man.

After closing our prayer, we drove to the small town of Chatham for a bite to eat. We ordered hamburgers and fries. He had a water while I opted for a beer.

Right behind us was a loud and raucous group of intoxicated individuals dropping f-bombs every other word which made me smirk.  God has a funny way of juxtaposing the sacred right next to the profane.

We got to talking with our bar mates and in between profanities began to share more and more of our humanity.

We left the bar, drove back to my home.

Before entering,  I paused and looked up at the starlit sky and then into Jake’s eyes and  said, “It’s all f-ing sacred, isn’t it?”

And we began to laugh.