The Weirdly Sacred Business of Being Human

On curiosity, wonder, and the strange places we encounter the sacred.

I’ve spent a surprising amount of my life thinking about God, which is perhaps an occupational hazard when you’re a minister. I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time playing video games, reading fantasy novels, talking to my dog, and wondering why human beings are so extraordinarily complicated. Somewhere along the way, I began to suspect that these interests might have more in common than I originally imagined. That’s part of the story behind Weirdly Sacred.

For much of my life, I’ve been drawn to the Big Questions. Why are we here? What makes a meaningful life? How do we learn to love one another when we’re so remarkably good at making things difficult? What happens when the beliefs we’ve inherited no longer seem large enough to hold our experiences? And why, despite centuries of philosophy, theology, and scientific inquiry, do we still find ourselves lying awake at two in the morning wondering whether we’re doing any of this correctly?

I don’t pretend to have particularly satisfying answers to most of these questions. In fact, the longer I’ve been engaged in the spiritual life, the more comfortable I’ve become with the possibility that some questions are worth living with rather than resolving.

I grew up with an understanding of the sacred that was largely shaped by Christianity, and Christianity remains an important part of who I am. I’m an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, after all, and I continue to find meaning in the teachings of Jesus, particularly his insistence that love, compassion, justice, and mercy belong at the center of human life. But I’ve also become increasingly interested in what happens when we loosen our grip on the boundaries we’ve drawn around the sacred.

One of the most significant shifts in my spiritual life began shortly after seminary, when I took a course in contemplative spirituality that introduced me to the ancient Celtic Christian tradition. I had spent years studying theology, wrestling with scripture, and learning how to think critically about faith. This course invited me to develop another way of knowing, one that involved slowing down, listening to my heart, and expanding my awareness of the world around me. I began to discover how much of my life I had spent thinking about the sacred while overlooking opportunities to experience it.

And then, of all places, something happened while I was sitting in traffic.

I don’t remember anything particularly remarkable about that day. I was sitting in my car, surrounded by other people in their cars, all of us presumably trying to get somewhere. But in the middle of that thoroughly ordinary experience, I had a sudden and profound sense of connection. I thought about the insight often associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Looking at the people around me, I became aware that each of us was living an entire universe of experiences, relationships, hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows. Here we were, strangers sitting in traffic, sharing this brief and extraordinary experience of being alive. Beneath all our differences, there was something profoundly connecting us.

I can’t entirely explain what happened in that moment, but I remember feeling that the boundaries separating me from everyone else had become a little less substantial. The people around me were no longer simply other drivers occupying the same stretch of road. They were fellow travelers in the deepest sense, each carrying a life as precious and mysterious as my own. I felt connected to them, to the world around me, and to something sacred that seemed to hold us all together.

I’ve returned to that experience many times over the years, and increasingly, I find myself wondering whether connection is at the very heart of spiritual life. So many of the great contemplatives, mystics, and theologians seem to be pointing toward this same mystery: that our lives are profoundly intertwined, that we belong to one another, and that our experience of the sacred is inseparable from relationship. We encounter it in our love for one another, in the natural world, in the quiet depths of our own awareness, and in those unexpected moments when the distance between ourselves and everything else seems to disappear.

Buddhist teachers have helped me understand the transformative possibilities of paying attention and recognizing our interconnectedness. Poets have taught me to notice beauty in the ordinary. Stories have invited me into lives and perspectives I might never otherwise encounter. Even the imaginary worlds of fantasy novels and video games have given me opportunities to think about courage, belonging, sacrifice, forgiveness, and the relationships that shape who we become.

I find myself increasingly convinced that the sacred is woven into the everyday experience of being alive. It’s present in our relationships, our creativity, our laughter, and our longing for connection. It can emerge through an unexpected act of kindness, a beautiful sentence, a difficult conversation, or the quiet realization that something we’ve believed for years may need to change. The challenge is that we’re often too busy, distracted, or preoccupied to notice.

One of my favorite things about the poet Mary Oliver is her extraordinary attentiveness to the world. She had a way of lingering with birds, ponds, trees, and other ordinary things until they revealed something remarkable. Her poetry has helped me understand that wonder is often less about discovering something extraordinary than about learning to see what’s already here.

This is one of the reasons contemplative practices have become so important in my life. Meditation, silence, and spiritual reflection invite us to pay closer attention to our experiences without immediately trying to explain, improve, or escape them. They create a little space between the endless noise of our thoughts and the deeper questions we carry. And I’ve come to believe that curiosity itself can be a spiritual practice.

Curiosity invites humility because it requires us to admit that there’s more to learn. It encourages compassion because it asks us to become interested in other people’s experiences rather than immediately judging them. It makes room for wonder because it keeps us open to possibilities we haven’t yet imagined. It’s sacred to be able to say, “I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.”

We’re creatures capable of contemplating the mysteries of the universe while simultaneously forgetting why we walked into the kitchen. We write beautiful poetry about love and then spend an unreasonable amount of time arguing with strangers on the internet. We long for connection, struggle with vulnerability, construct elaborate stories about who we are, and occasionally become emotionally invested in fictional characters who don’t exist.

We are fascinating.

I believe our peculiarities, contradictions, and imperfections might have something to teach us about the sacred, too. Perhaps the invitation is to become more attentive to the lives we’re actually living, with all their awkwardness, complexity, beauty, and uncertainty.

Weirdly Sacred is my little corner of the internet for thinking out loud about spirituality, meaning, curiosity, and the strange business of being human. Some days that might mean reflecting on a passage of scripture or a Buddhist teaching. Other days it might involve a poem, a book, a video game, an interesting historical discovery, or a question that’s been following me around for weeks.

I’m particularly interested in the places where these worlds overlap, where an ancient spiritual insight illuminates a contemporary experience or an unexpected encounter challenges how we understand ourselves. I also hope this can be a place where people feel welcome to bring their questions, their doubts, and their wonderfully complicated selves. You don’t need to believe what I believe, share my religious background, or even consider yourself particularly spiritual to find something worth exploring here.

More than anything, I hope this becomes a place for connection, where curiosity brings us together, our differences make the conversation richer, and we discover something of ourselves in one another.

I’m glad you’ve found your way to this little corner of the internet. I can’t promise profound revelations or tidy answers, although I suspect we’ll occasionally stumble upon something meaningful. I can promise curiosity, a good deal of compassion, some questionable humor, and a willingness to look for wonder in places where we might not expect to find it.