What is The Sacred Story?

If we could answer that definitively perhaps it would no longer be sacred. However, one way to describe it is as a personal communal experience arising from a multidimensional tapestry of personal stories inspired by sparks of revelation. What makes this imaginal field “sacred” is that these stories are sourced, in one way or another, in The Mystery, or the Secret. Yet only if/when experienced as such by the individual.

 

A Communal Experience

At the heart of the Sacred Story is a collective memory of a common origin, unlearnt and only glimpsed, and a shared intuition about our destination. This experience runs from our ancestors through us to our offspring and theirs and yet is not located in time, has no definable shape, nor discernible purpose. Although, from time to time, a “storyteller” may help us see, hear, feel and recognize it as if, for a moment, it were real.  

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A Personal Story

These fleeting revelations are encoded in human consciousness and live on as personal stories. Some of these stories are of the most ordinary kind—household tales. Others lead us out into the inexplicable, setting us adrift in a numinous world where reason and language are left behind; leaving a trace in our hearts, waiting to be kindled. And some are only decipherable by initiates of a lore passed down through the ages from breath to breath.

 

A Secret

A personal story gets woven into the tapestry of the Sacred Story when it provokes the giddy certainty of unknowing. At the heart of these stories, we might say, is a secret— something so unknowable, yet so clear that even the teller of the tale is left in wonderment.  No matter how often the story is told, its conclusion spirals down into a luminous emptiness, a radiant vortex of benign perplexity.

 

Beloved Community

It could be that the Sacred Story is just another way of seeing Beloved Community, that they are, in a sense, the same thing. Could it be that the vision of a fully realized human community is an intuition—deeply desired and yet, in a way, so real, so evident that it is experienced.  It is made of personal stories lived and logged for milenia. And at the heart of Beloved Community? A mystery, a “not yet here” potentiality haunting us in our loves, in our trials, in our dreams at night, in our reveries at dawn.