Profane and Sacred in the Journey w/ biblical parallel

In Luke 6:12 it says “One day soon afterward Jesus went up on a mountain to pray, and he prayed to God all night.” As I was reading this passage it reminded me of the profane and sacred time and how the two are very different. Personally, I see profane as this time that one spends living for themselves and not very focused on the bigger picture. However, when I think of sacred time I think of one being much more selfless in the time they spend, that their specific time is very important and has great value. In the passage above it talks about how Jesus went away to spend time with God, his father. He wanted to make time for something so significant and made sure he was isolated wherever he went to spend that time so he goes to a far off mountain. I don’t think Jesus looked at this time as something profane, something that had a time limit. I think he saw it as so much more than that, something very sacred to him. He had no sense of time while on this mountain, in fact, I can picture him being completely carefree and simply enjoying time with his father. Similarly, when I go to spend time with God or have a “quiet time” as some may call it, I have no agenda on my mind. I also prefer to be alone and in my own space so that nothing can intervene with me as I spend time with God. This is a very sacred time for me. I never really thought about the parallel of one’s own quiet to how Jesus went to a mountain to spend time with God. In fact, in both scenarios a very similar concept occurs. In the passage, God gets away from everything and just spends time with his father not worrying about anything else. In my own way, I am also getting away and spending time with my God without weighing down or dwelling on the things going on in my life. Eliade Micrea says in her except, The Sacred and Profane: The nature of religion, that “when the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expense.” When I read what she says, in a lot of ways I see my own quiet time with God being represented by that. I am able to escape my life for just a little bit and live in this “absolute reality” and it just makes everything feel so much different. I feel alive, whole, refreshed, and it really makes me realize how important and evident the sacredness of that time really is.

           

A Bold Spiritual Journey in the Making

My friends and I traveled over to join our friends from William and Mary for a night of prayer and worship. Half way through worship the the fire alarm randomly went off. As we waited outside in the cold to figure out when we could get back inside to resume worship we figured why not just keep praising God on the steps of the building. It was Halloween weekend and I began to realize that the building we were at sat right next to the street and was a pretty busy spot. College students dressed in their Halloween costumed passed by us every few minutes. Not only that but we were right next to a bar at which people intoxicated were constantly rolling in and out of. I took myself out of the equation for a second and thought to myself, what would Jesus be doing right now?

Jesus loved to walk into the darkness so that He could invade it with his light. Not only that but other than being sinless and growing a sweet beard, what makes me that much different from Him? The point I am getting at is that Jesus was a human being JUST LIKE ME. So I started intercepting people as they walked by and started off just commenting on their costumes or simply saying hello to them… my hope was that if I could stop them and at least carry a conversation with them then there wasn’t a good reason to why I could share the gospel with them. Seriously though, why wouldn’t I? People are dying every day and we need to step up as Christians and realize that the LIVING Spirit of the Lord lives inside of us and they are desperate to encounter His love. My job got even easier as people at the bars and parties started to hear the music even more and slowly but surely started making their way on by.

While I got to tell multitudes of people about Jesus, one group in particular really stood out to me. Their names were Emily, Lexi, Phil, and Steven. They had been on their way back to their dorm from a party when they topped to heard the live music going on. They talked about how they felt something different about all of us and how there seemed to be “life” to what we were doing. I then took complete advantage of their curiosity and asked them if they knew God and how much he loved them. While they claimed to at least know God, it became clear that they didn’t understand the fullness of love that He had to offer them. 

Buber Inspire Relationships- Man to Man and Man to God

relation exists… first starting with human to human.

            Human to human relations is likely the most obvious relation considering it occurs every day. In our lecture on Tuesday we discussed how treating others in reciprocity means we see them as subjective beings; therefore, they exist as a “You” and not an “It.” This is so because we are not defining or limiting who they are; rather we are engaging ourselves into their life and investing consciousness in our conversation with them. We are “[treating] others the way we would like to be treated” (The Bible- Luke6:31) and that can be shown by how we are not treating them as a third person but first person thus acknowledging their existence of being ‘there.’

            God to human relation is a little different in the sense that it may not be as common as human to human relation depending on the person. In this instance I think of the Phenomenology of Prayer and how Benson (2005) mentions the encounter with Samuel and the Lord. I think because God is not visibly present we, more times than not, tend to view him more as an objective deity than subjective. I think that is why it takes Samuel three times to hear God’s voice until he finally realizes it is actually God calling to him. Buber (1929) mentions that “Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You” and I think that is the problem so many of us deal with and what Samuel was dealing with. We, and he, are yet to live in the spirit of God because we have not yet responded to our “you.” Once we are able to do so we then see God’s interaction with us as a more direct, first person, kind of presence and not a distanced third person presence in which the relation is utterly “It” and not “You.”