Redefining the Sacred

Abstract

Gathered here at the end of the Twentieth Century, we peer into the dawning of the coming millennium, fearful and hopeful of what the human journey will be. Pondering the same questions, Elie Weisel, holocaust survivor and internationally renowned writer, recently concluded a speech in San Francisco with a story about a man who had gotten lost deep in a forest.¹ Finally, another man appeared who was also lost and asked, “How do I find my way out of here?” The first man answered, “I don’t know, just not the way you came in.” Certainly, the Twentieth Century is not something we want to repeat. The question remains, “How do we get out of here?” In order to understand and commit ourselves to a new direction, we also need to have some notion of how we got lost. What needs to change if we are to not only survive together on this planet, but, indeed to flourish? The patterns of violence towards each other and towards this earth are too familiar: pollution, starvation, crime, and wars. We could enumerate these forces which threaten our biological and social survival for hours and argue for days which have greater priority.