Each and Every One of Us is Sacred

My written remarks for the students of Hagerstown Community College

I had to walk all the way across America to realize a very simple thing. A truth, I’m going to call it. This particular truth is something I think you already know, something I think pretty much everyone knows at some level. Even I knew it before I set out to walk across my country right after graduating from college, but I knew this truth in the same way I knew blue whales exist. I had never seen a blue whale myself. There are some things, maybe all things, that we have to see with our own eyes and feel with our own guts and hearts, before the truth of them can mean anything to us.

So, I had to walk across America to find out, with my own eyes and guts and heart, that each and every one of us is sacred.

Each and every one of us is sacred.

Sacred.

Sacred.

You know what I mean, right?

Each and every one of us is sacred.

Have you seen this blue whale before?

Let me explain what I mean by sacred. I do not mean, something that should be worshipped, bowed down to in subservience . . . although if we were to really listen to each other, if we really understood each other, if we could hear the lonely secrets in the heart of the grocery store clerk, if you could feel the depression of the man who just cut you off in traffic, if we really knew who it was we were sitting next to, your professors, your classmates, if they trusted us with the truth of who they really are, their vulnerability, their humanity, we might indeed want to bow down to them then . . . not in subservience, but in reverence, the way you might bow down to the survivor of a catastrophe.

Our humanity is the brutal, beautiful catastrophe we are born into. No matter how safe you play it, no matter how privileged you get it, to be human is to be vulnerable. We are susceptible to injury and illness. We die. And worst of all, we love, which opens us up to all kinds of agonies. The vulnerability of our humanity calls for a reverent approach, the way we might approach a sacred altar.

Each and every one of us is sacred.

You’re going to have to go whale-watching for this one on your own. Don’t take my word for it. Find out for yourself. You don’t have to walk across America. You just have to start listening, listening deep. How deep can you go?

There was an old man on my walk, man named Bill Guy. He was in his eighties when I met him on a cold winter night in the backwoods of central Alabama. It was sunset when I walked into a dusty farm store on a country road in the middle of nowhere, looking for a place to set up my tent for the night. He chatted with me for a while, said I was silly to be walking across America in the winter, and then padded me down to see if I had a gun. “You don’t seem crazy,” he said, and then told me I could walk to his house a mile down the road and stay in his woodshop that night, which he kept nice and toasty with a wood-burning stove.

About half an hour later, I got to his house, and he sat up with me till midnight while I recorded his stories. I wore a sign on my backpack that said I was walking to listen, so whenever someone trusted me enough to let me record them, I always did. Each sacred person has a gospel of their own. It’s called their life. That night, I got to listen to the gospel of Bill Guy. I got to sit at the sacred altar of his humanity .

He sat in his rocking chair, ripping cigarettes, and at one point I finally asked him what it was like to get old, to start seeing all the people you love die, one by one. All of his siblings were dead. His parents. His friends were dying now. What was that like? I wanted to know, because I wanted to be prepared for when it was my turn.

He said, “It hurts, when your mama dies, and your daddy dies. It hurts bad. You’ll grieve. And it hurts just about as bad when your siblings die, too. You’ll grieve again. Yeah,” he said, looking right into my eyes, “you got lots of grieving to do.”

You got lots of grieving to do. Now there’s a whale of truth. It was one of those obvious truths that everyone knows—you got lots of grieving to do—but it’s so easy to forget. Maybe the most obvious truths are the easiest ones to forget because they’re so obvious, like the preciousness of air, the pricelessness of a single breath. Sometimes we forget the most obvious truths until we’re forced to remember. Hold your breath for just one minute, and it won’t take long to remember the obvious truth that a single breath is worth more than a thousand diamonds.

But we can’t just talk about a truth like that. It’s an experience that allows it to mean something to us. It’s not enough to know it as an idea. You gotta know it with your own eyes and guts and heart. Your lungs. So, I’m going to try something here. Never done this before in a talk. I’m going to hold my breath for one minute, join me if you want, and we’re going to find out what the truth is about a single breath of air.

[I had one of the students put on a timer for one minute, then held my breath. I barely made it. It was kind of awkward, but people clapped when I finally breathed again.]

See, the truth. It’s something you feel, in your lungs, your guts, your heart.

A single breath of air is more priceless than a thousand diamonds.

You got lots of grieving to do.

There are so many truths to go whale-watching for. Hold your breath, go deep, and find out for yourself.

Each and every one of us is sacred.

Find out. Ask your neighbor a question, a real one. Give them a real answer. Listen to the gospel of their life, and share yours. Earn their trust, and give yours to those who are capable of respecting the sacredness of you. Could it be true?

Each and every one of us is sacred.

For me, this isn’t some theological statement so much as it is just common sense. Sacred, to me, simply refers to something that ought to be considered with great sensitivity and exquisite care and ferocious devotion, respected deeply. We all might have different understandings of what’s sacred, but surely we would all agree that whatever it is, it’s something that must not be violated, right? Something that must be protected, and cherished, and celebrated. Who among us doesn’t fit this definition of sacred? Who among us doesn’t deserve to be cherished, protected, even celebrated?

That guy over there. That guy is definitely not sacred.

These people are sacred over here. But not those people. Never those people.

He’s sacred.

She’s not.

I am.

You’re not.

You are.

I’m not.

No.

Each and every one of us.

Each and every one of us.

You don’t need to walk across America to find the sacred. You don’t need to go whale-watching. It’s right here.

I was at my neighborhood bicycle shop the other day. Sadie’s Bikes. It was my first time in the shop. It’s new. There’s a beautiful handmade sign outside. Their logo is a bicycle wheel with rainbow colors between the spokes and a little bird, a wren, nestled beside the tire. The owner is a big man about my age, white guy, long scraggly beard, looks more like a motorcycle kind of biker than a bicycle biker. Nick. He showed me a few bikes, sent me out on a test ride, and then we got into a chat. He told me he opened up the shop a couple years ago, at a different location, but then the pandemic hit, and his landlord lost his mind, and so he and his wife had to find a new location for the shop, this one, right here on the river down the road from my apartment. They just reopened and business was good. They were doing it. This was a dream he’d always had, to have a bike shop.

“Who’s Sadie?” I said, just getting ready to leave.

“She was our daughter,” Nick said. “She died in her mother’s womb a week before she was supposed to be born. My wife gave birth to her stillborn. Her name was going to be Sadie Wren.” He pointed to the little wren on their logo.

You never know when someone’s sacredness is going to come out like that, like a breeching whale, or a wild deer emerging from the woods. You can’t control it. You can’t chase it or force it. You can learn how to listen for it, though. You can learn how to get still, and how to see clearly through your own fears and judgments and biases. You can learn how to track.

But trackers know that there’s never a guarantee the deer will come. And when it’s the sacred we’re tracking, the holy humanity hidden inside the other, or if we’re searching for our own, there can be no tricks, no salt licks or fake urine. The sacred deer inside can smell bullshit from a mile away. The sacred deer knows what’s true, knows what can be trusted. You’re not just going to share your most vulnerable, sacred truth with someone who hasn’t done the work to earn that glimpse of you. That glimpse of your parents’ divorce. That breakup. Your Sadie Wren. Or maybe your heart hasn’t been broken yet, blown open by life, by the fact of your human vulnerability. That’ll come. You got lots of grieving to do. You ready? It’s not a bad thing. It’s a sacred thing. Who are you going to share it with, show it to? Who has earned the right to see you, to really see you? We need you, who you really are. We need each other.

To become worthy of glimpsing the sacredness of someone else, to be trustworthy, this takes work. And this work of becoming trustworthy, the work of listening, the work of paying attention and tracking the truth, it’s always right here, right now.

Each and every one of us is sacred.

Sacred: That which must be protected and cherished. That which must not be violated.

The fact that humans have been violating each other in so many different ways for so many years isn’t proof that we are not sacred. Think about it: When a two-year-old who’s just learning how to use his body, who doesn’t understand how to relate to other human bodies, when this child smacks his mother in the face, this is not evidence that his mother deserves to be hit in the face or that the child is evil. It’s simply evidence of what the child hasn’t yet learned. We’re still children when it comes to understanding what the sacredness within each of us demands and deserves. We’re still learning how to relate to each other in a way that’s guided by our understanding of who we are as sacred beings who belong to each other.

What if this wasn’t just an idea, a bunch of words that some guy said up on a stage that one time? What if you held your breath for a minute and found out for yourself? What if each of us was actively exploring whether or not what I’m saying is true? What would change, in your classes, on your dorms? What would your parties be like?

Each and every one of us is sacred.

But what about the assholes? The criminals? What about the people you disagree with, who just won’t listen, who’ve hurt others, who don’t care at all about the sacredness? What about those people?

There was a guy outside New Orleans on my walk, on the bayou, who cursed me out from his front porch on the side of the road for being a Northerner, a Yankee. I’d never been verbally attacked like that. I didn’t yell back, tried to get still and listen, but after he kept yelling at me, I just said thank you and turned to keep walking.

“Hey, wait,” the guy said suddenly.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Do you, do you like beer?” he goes.

“Yeah.”

“You, uh, you want one?”

One hour later, I was sitting at this man’s kitchen table, and he was telling me all kinds of nasty stories about how violent he was and how racist he was, almost like he was baiting me into despising him, when suddenly he let it slip, almost like he didn’t mean to. He said, “I was pissed off that day because I had to bury my son.” There it was, the deer. That glimpse of his vulnerability. His pain. His sacred humanity, worthy of great sensitivity and exquisite care and ferocious devotion.

It’s our pain that has the power to connect us, if only we weren’t ashamed of it, if only we didn’t run from it and pretend it doesn’t exist. If only we knew it was sacred.

But some of us do know. Some of us are trackers of the sacred, seekers of the truth. When we see the pain, even when it hisses and spits at us from the side of the highway on the bayou, we can see it for what is. A funny way of asking for help, one of my teachers would say. We do have some funny ways of asking for help, don’t we?

The thing about glimpsing the sacred vulnerability of someone’s humanity, their Sadie Wren, is that it makes it much more difficult for you to hate them, or judge them, or wish they just kind of didn’t exist. Seeing the truth of someone’s pain can break the cycle of ignorance which only creates more pain. If I know who you are, if I am not ignorant to the heart and guts of you, if I’ve seen you with my own eyes, who you really are underneath the charades and the defenses, you are no longer just an idea to me. I’ve experienced you. You are a human. The truth of you means something to me now.

Each and every one of us is sacred.

Each and every one of us is sacred.

What does this mean, to you? How can you test it for yourself? What would it look like for you to listen inward, to meet the many parts of yourself, and to esteem them all as sacred?

Walking across America was much less glamorous than it might sound. Mostly, I was alone, on the road, putting one foot in front of the other. No smart phone. Just, there. I had time and space to feel things I had been running from for years. My parents’ divorce. That breakup I went through. And so much more.

Eventually, as I approached the Pacific Ocean after almost a year of walking, I started to think about my death. It kind of felt like I was dying. I would randomly burst into tears on the side of the highway, feeling my way forward into the fact that I, too, will die someday. That’s the Moby Dick of truth right there: You’re gonna die. And I wasn’t fighting it like some deranged Ahab. I was open to it. Walking to listen, willing to listen, even to that.

All that time I spent alone, my tears, my fears, all of it, all of you, sacred.

When I finally made it to the ocean outside San Francisco, a group of people was waiting for me there: my mom and my dad, my stepmom, my friends, some people I met on my walk, some people who just happened to be there at the beach that day. They welcomed me in a big circle and I stood there at the center and wept with gratitude for my life, for this sacred, sacred life that is always sacred no matter how profoundly we might forget it. That breath you just took right there without even thinking about it? It’s still worth more than a thousand diamonds. If you need a reminder, just hold your breath until the truth comes back in the burning of your lungs and the bulging of your eyes and the beating of your precious heart.

Each and every one of us is sacred.

Don’t take my word for it. Go find out for yourself. Thank you for listening.