What images or memories does this question conjure for you?
Also, what are your aims? (Don’t answer that. This is not a self-help podcast.)
When I ask my undergraduate students to articulate the aims for their entrepreneurial projects, I hope and pray they won’t ask me mine. Not because I don’t have one. Here it is (don’t tell anyone): To honour the sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.
The word ‘sacred’ sounds a little hokey or New Agey to my ears, but I can’t think of a better word.
Episode 80 explores the sociological phenomenon of sacredness. We discuss the importance of the sacred and profane dichotomy in Durkheim’s theory of religion. We draw upon Goffman to posit that uttering profanities might be part of a sacred ritual of drawing boundaries around self and other. And we explore the mysterious ways that language creates sacred spaces where new ideas emerge.
This could be a tricky question, for lots of reasons. People may not understand your faith. People may not understand how your faith is connected to your culture. People may not understand why you aren’t part of a religion. Maybe your experiences of religion have been traumatic in some way.
To make this topic a little more light-hearted, it might be best to start with a different question.
What’s your most embarrassing religious moment?
Here’s mine: I accidentally became a born-again Christian at the age of 12.
In this episode we explore my hapless conversion in more detail. We gain some perspective from a book called The elementary forms of religious life, written by French sociologist Emile Durkheim.
In Durkheim’s analysis of what’s at the root of all religions, he draws these conclusions:
When people worship, they’re connecting with something bigger than themselves
This ‘bigger thing’ is society
Without society people would not experience themselves as people; they’d have no sense of who they were in the world
These conclusions are a little hard to swallow, particularly because we live in a moment where we’re right to be critical of society and the roles it establishes for us. Especially as these roles are carved out of endemic structural injustices.
But why do human beings need to actively connect with something bigger than themselves? It seems to me we’re already connected to something bigger than us—the natural world.
When I imagine the natural world as a conscious entity—and it’s one of the themes I love to explore in my fiction—it makes me feel like I am already part of a bigger picture.
This is true for me even though I feel separate from the natural world, even though I feel my experience is limited by the constraints of my language and my society.
The idea I most like to play with in my fiction is that the human experience of separation from the natural world is not a flaw, but a design principle.
I explore this notion in most recent story, ‘First words’, which is available on my Grammar for Dreamers blog grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. I intended the ‘Seer’ character to be an agent of the natural world, creating language to produce the experience of separation, the concept of the self.
The idea is that those of us who believe we inhabit selves (e.g. human beings!) are the routes by which the Earth itself experiences new ideas.
Intrigued? Would you like some more ideas about on how to tap into these insights on language and the self? Check out my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’: bit.ly/lensoflanguage
Structured Visions 