Where Presence Becomes Sanctuary
on finding the sacred in the everyday
Raised in the solemn beauty of the Catholic Church, as a young girl I believed the sacred lived in the incense, stained glass, in the flicker of votive candles, and the quiet, rhythmic order of Sunday mass. The older I get, the more life I’ve lived, the more joys and sorrows I’ve known—the more I notice that it’s in the everyday moments and places. The sacred, I’m learning, does not ask to be elevated. It asks to be witnessed.
There is a kind of ceremony that doesn’t require incense or bells. It happens when we place our hand gently on the kettle handle, when we pause to look out the window before answering the next email, when we whisper thank you without knowing exactly to whom. These are the moments that build a kind of shelter—not one with walls and a roof, but a tender architecture of presence. Like a shawl around the shoulders at dusk, these gestures don’t proclaim anything, but they hold warmth nonetheless.
What are the ways I mark time as sacred, with quiet noticing? A thread of light across my desk in the late afternoon. A squirrel that rests in the same crook where branch meets tree just as I lie down for my own nap. The scent that arrives just before rain. The soft warmth of a rough stone held in my palm. The texture (and the sound) of ballpoint pen meeting paper as I write in my notebook. These are invitations to the sacredness of my everyday life. They ask nothing of me but to be present in the right now, to bear witness to the ordinary holiness of this moment—this breath, this glance, this waiting.
We are so often taught to live for the moment when we cross a finish line, reach a goal, become the version of ourselves we’ve imagined. But what about the changing seasons of becoming, the chapters without titles? What about the long hours in which nothing resolves, and yet everything subtly rearranges? The sea drawing back before a wave returns. The steeping of tea. The breath before the word is spoken. These are thresholds too, and perhaps they are the place where our worries and longings can rest a while.
Is there a softness available, a certain kind of “answered prayer” when we release the need to arrive and instead begin to ask, How shall I be with this? Not fix it. Not improve it. Just be with it, as one might sit beside a friend who doesn’t need advice, only company. This is the sacred pause, the subtler ceremony that I rely on more and more: lighting a candle at the end of the day not to mark completion, but simply to say, I am here. You are here. We are here. And…what if here is not a stop along the way, but the altar of life?
Sacred
It is not in the cathedral of heavenly sky,
in the womb of stone church, cold
echoes on stone floor, hard
benches, stained glass windows
diluting the streaming light.
It is in the pungent earth, muddy
field, furrows of matted grass,
wings beating silent. Sun soaking
hot and salt rising on surface of skin.
It is not in the vessel of water
christened holy, babe strapped
in fine garments while prayers float
through fussing cries.
No, it is found in the slime of birth,
blood and the shrill cry of breath,
greedy mouth at a breast
while eyes meet, life to life
for the very first time.
It is in the musky scent
of a man who has worked,
as you lie with him
in the stillness of crickets
and sweatsoaked white linens,
not in silken garments, golden rings
exchanged in a crowd. No.
It is witnessed in the cling
of unadorned bodies
touching in the dark
of life’s gnawed bone.
What in your day is asking to be witnessed? What is one ordinary thing that became holy today?
My husband and I wake up and say I am so blessed (to wake up next to you another day). We have done this throughout the whole of our partnership. We both had been married before and we didnt know where the resentments and such came in an ruined those. So one morning after seeing each other and feeling the lovely chance at another day together decided that this would be our gauge? So when mornings come and we feel less than blessed to wake up next to each other we would communicate that immediately, and it has served us well.
I love synchronicity between your words today and the story today in letters of love by Elizabeth Gilbert shared a story told by Ram Dass:
Someone in the audience had asked Ram Dass whether reincarnation was real, and he explained that not only was it real, but (here comes the wild idea!) it’s something that happens to you every single day.
Every morning when you wake up, he said, you are reincarnated into new life. It’s like the sleep process is a kind of ego-death, or a hard reset on your brain and being. Whatever happened to you the day before has died away, never to be regained. The deep future, the mysterious far-ahead place is an utter mystery. And so you must wake up into a world of presence — a brand new world that has never existed before. And you must face that world as a “self” who has never existed before, tossed into ocean waves of new challenges that have never existed before.
No matter how similar this day may seem to the one that came before, it’s all new, and so are you. You can only ever be reincarnated.
The question, then, is this: Who am I going to be in THIS lifetime, on THIS day? What is being offered in this 24-hour lifetime? What is being asked?
I had never heard this story and it makes your words even more precious about living big and living present to see all those precious differences of the light outside or the partner beside you, and the person you are today, ever reincarnating.
Thank you as always for your words Kateri. Always starts my day happily. Happy Mother's Day to all who nurture themselves, this world and the people in it in whatever form.
This is beautiful and so thought provoking Kateri. . . Thank you for sharing and have a wonderful day~