When I was growing up, it was easy to know what was holy. It was a special designation applied to things that had been somehow blessed. We even gave some of them names, such as holy water. I learned that water was considered holy because it had been blessed by a priest. It was simply called holy water to distinguish its special status.
I also learned from the nuns whom I helped in the sacristy, that in time of shortage more water could be made holy by adding ordinary water to what had already been made holy. I was cautioned not to add more than half, lest the holiness be too diluted. I figured out that once such a mixing was carefully done, another half could be added to what I had just made holy. The waving hands and words of a priest’s blessing could be made unnecessary.
In my young mind, some cynical, doubting seeds were being planted at an early age.
Those early seeds have grown into a full-blown conviction that I make nothing holy. I am convinced that holiness is a given. All things are holy, if only I have the eyes to see. I have begun to reclaim the sense of holy that once was commonplace. I am in my small way retracing the steps that humans took to move away from the holy. I am remembering a time when my ancestors considered all things holy, especially the earth.
I think that my ancestors once woke up in the morning with a sense that the world around was holy, a manifestation of the divine. There were certain places where the experience of that holiness was especially strong. These were hills, streams, mountains and caves. There were some living things like trees and even some structures which were more evidently holy. Some people were more clearly manifestations of an ultimate reality. But holiness was ubiquitous, widespread, in all things.
Unfortunately, some of my ancestors sought to separate holiness from common, day to day experience. The sense of the divine was pushed away from the tangible earth and became a fixture “out there” in a separate place. Birth and death became extraordinary events, no longer part of the routine cyclical order of reality. Immortality became wishful thinking when a sense of the timeless here and now was abandoned. What was once a sense of all of reality became lost. My ancestors reached out in desperation for escape into a future imagined reality.
My own dualistic way of thinking is part of my impoverished inheritance from my ancestors who no longer saw all things as holy. I want to reclaim what they lost. I want a ripening sense of the here and now, my way of experiencing the holy. I want the earth to be a living entity for me, glowing with all the radiance of what is holy.
Neither I or anyone else can make anything holy. Everything around me is by nature already holy. I may uncover or discover that holy nature, but it is already there.
Without intending, the nuns in my grade school may have sparked a latent awareness in me by telling me to just add more water to make more holy water. They too may have had the intuition that the water was actually already holy. All the water.