Our Power to Create the Sacred

“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” -Tao Te Ching

One of the rituals my young family has embraced is the last-minute search for something essential before leaving the house to do anything. Our initial rituals involved “the finding of the socks.” There were only three pairs of socks my daughter would wear to pre-K, and they never seemed to be where we put them the night before. Today, several years later, we have a far more sophisticated system involving the needs of all four family members.

This Saturday was the first day of a new swim season, so we celebrated with the losing of the goggles. My wife acts in an administrative capacity during these rituals focusing her efforts at finding the essential object while my daughter acts as a sort of Greek chorus that chants, “are we going to be late?” I perform a consulting role assigning blame and suggesting various means for the avoidance of loss in the future. And so it was while assigning blame concerning the goggles that I arrived at something worth parenting over.

My angst was not so much over being late, as I have learned to get my family moving fifteen minutes before they would reasonably need to be moving which seems to do the trick. Rather a clear image came to me: the reverence I had as a child for objects like my baseball glove, my bat, and my hockey stick. I was not a particularly wise kid like my son and daughter seem to be. But I understood that these seemingly worthless objects were the means to priceless experiences. As I accepted the need to buy another set of goggles, I understood the need to talk to my daughter about what has worth and what does not.

Later that day I sat down with my daughter and presented her with two objects that had no market value. One was a yoga mat I have had for the last eight years and the other was the key to her grandmother’s house. We discussed the fact that in and of themselves these objects had no value at all, but each in its own way delivered priceless experiences. My yoga mat is my means for serving both my family and my community. The key is really a key to a grandmother’s unconditional love. We also discussed the idea that what we put into something is what we get out of it. As a young person I treated my wrestling shoes as sacred objects, like a warrior’s sword and shield. And in those shoes I was able to experience a true hero’s journey.

Everything in our lives is essentially empty. Our marriages, our families, our friendships, our careers are all empty of any objective meaning. What we experience, then, in our marriages, families, friendships, and careers is what we put into them.