The Sacred and Profane: Why We Can't Tell the Difference

The first thing I imagine when I hear "sacred" is the Sacrament of bread and water on the Sabbath. It's a symbolic act reminding the partaker and witnesses of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, his pain and death, to which we owe our existence, our salvation, our comfort, and anything that comes afterwards. When a soul feels that debt, the union and gratitude to the Savior becomes precious, and we cling to it as best we know how.

How often, though, have you heard someone shout his name as a curse, either on television, or in your presence? If you believe in His divinity and the Atonement, how does that profanity make you feel? That difference, the mocking use of something sacred for something trivial or supremely inappropriate, defines profanity very succinctly.

William Shakespeare, almost half a millenium ago, wrote a funny and insightful comedy called Twelfth Night whose name even refers to a reversal, a contrast, and reveling in the inappropriate. Shakespeare questioned the lines between Sacred and Profane for the same reasons we do; because his life was tangled in language, and because both Sacred and Profane things are taboo. If God treats them identically, how are we to tell the difference?

In Twelfth Night: or What You Will (yes, it's a pun on his  name. It always is), a woman (Viola) dressed as a man (Cesario) is sent by the man she loves (Orsino) to deliver his protestations of love to another woman (Olivia). Orsino obviously doesn't know how his "friend" feels about him, but he has adored Olivia for a long time, while she has been in mourning for her father and brother, and won't hear of dating anyone. The two women, one dressed as a man, recall, have a conversation when they first meet. Viola, whose name so resembles Olivia's (and Malvolio's) that the conversation feels like schizophrenia, says this: 

What I am, and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead; to your ears, divinity, to any other's, profanation.

Viola identifies the taboo, but not as utterly forbidden, only restricted. She accepts a situation in which the profane would become the sacred. She's actually making a joke about it, and to someone who might be her other self, if she had also capitulated to mourning; her father and brother are also dead.

That "what I am" means much to me. The whole sentence resounds with an idea (likely more mine than Shakespeare's, but don't let me take credit for his genius). The female body is both sacred and profane. Evil men and stupid women - and evil women and stupid men - turn the sacred human body into a collection of insults, and not just verbally.

Women in our restrictive, protestant culture (/s) learn that our bodies are taboo. We mustn't talk about our bits and pieces, and when men do, it's to curse. Linguistically, profaning the male body is more prevalent (how many times have I called somebody a dickhead?), but in all other respects,as in tabooing, hiding, shaming, women seem to suffer more. We mustn't say the names, as if our selves would answer that call, like Voldemort. The younger generations learn the same error: to hide their sinful parts from the innocent gazes of boys and men with what we call "modesty."

The world's answer to this imbalance is to undo the taboo with discourse, ranging from the ever-popular "Vagina Monologues" to the ever-more-popular C-word, and to undress ourselves publically "unashamed." But I don't think that's the answer. I'm not ashamed of my body, but I don't let everyone look at it, either. Our bodies are still sacred, even if we have mistaken them for profane.

I learned the difference between keeping secret and holding sacred in the temple. I don't describe the rites or use the language outside its walls, and when the words appear, I often feel uncomfortable. I'm not necessarily afraid of God's wrath (ever) or society, but I am anxious that those things not become common, or profane. That protection is something I do in my head, because God has asked me to. It can't be externally enforced, or externally broken, but the world can wear us down. We change the nature of ourselves in our minds, and can even come to believe ourselves "dirty" simply for being a gendered, functional human. But our bodies, every uncomfortable part of them, are temples. We are still sacred, if our language is profane. It all happens in our heads.

Douglas Adams was wrong: there's no such thing as "obscenely biological," only the profaned sacred.

Throughout the scriptures, the prophets use language about the human body that makes me uncomfortable in a way similar to when I hear temple language in Sunday School. The Lord's bowels are full of mercy. A mother will not forget a suckling child. We were known of God from our mother's womb. A man's progeny is of his loins. We wince, or edit when we read aloud as if our bodies were profane, but they are not. Some pieces are more pleasant than others to our modern sensiblities, and in this age of obsessive hygiene. When the prophets of the bible use my anatomy to help me understand something, it has an impact it loses when we speak crassly of ourselves, or treat our bodies too casually. And someday I will have this conversation with my children. Over, and over until they understand it, just like Heavenly Father does for me.