Living in a World Where Nothing Is Sacred

Our world today is increasingly becoming a disenchanted world, emptied of everything sacred, and there are many who are pleased by this. What about you? How do you see the effect of this disenchanted world, emptied of the sacred, upon your everyday life?

There was once a time when every tribe and every home had a sacred corner containing a statue or an object regarded as sacred. Care and respect for what was sacred required a different kind of attention. The sacred statue was cleaned carefully, and people tried to ensure that fragrance, beauty and meticulous care never disappeared from that sacred corner. You may think that because something was regarded as sacred it received this kind of attention, but one can also understand the relationship in the opposite direction: what we attend to, and care for with exceptional devotion, becomes sacred to us.

The modern world is a world whose slogan is to possess more, more cheaply, with lower maintenance costs and requiring less care—in short, the more low-maintenance, the better. A world full of plastic flowers, artificial lawns, inexpensive clothing requiring little care, unbreakable statues and cups, and cheap disposable things. A world in which even children are expected to have inexpensive toys and dolls that are not meant to evoke a sense of value in their minds. Even statues of the Buddha have become cheap and maintenance-free. In this world we are not supposed to spend time on anything, or devote energy and careful attention to maintaining it. We are not supposed to make anything, anyone, or any idea sacred—or even valuable—through our time and care. In our world today, not only is nothing sacred any longer; nothing has value either.

What makes a flowerpot valuable is the attention and care required to keep it alive. If you had only two items of clothing, and had to wash, iron, mend and continually repair them, you would not only see a different value in those clothes but would feel a kind of respect for them in your heart. What made the Little Prince’s rose sacred to him, and his fox tame in relation to him, was a deep meaning born from continuous attention, presence and care. In today’s world, even the friends we have and the love we seek are expected to be inexpensive and low-maintenance.

Social media have increased the number of our friends into the hundreds and thousands while at the same time transforming the meaning of friendship in our minds. Masses of low-cost, low-maintenance friends whose function resembles that of every other disposable object in this cheap, low-cost, high-consumption world. Friendship, and the friend, like everything else, have been emptied of sacredness, value and respect so that we can possess more of them.

In this world we no longer need to write letters to the person we love and wait weeks for a reply. Even within shared lives, food and entertainment are increasingly pre-prepared and require less energy, and in this way love too has become inexpensive and low-maintenance. But has this high-consumption world requiring little care and maintenance—this disenchanted world emptied of the sacred—given our lives greater happiness and meaning?

The truth is that the fewer things we find valuable and sacred in this world, the emptier and less valuable we become inwardly. What we strip of value outside us also empties us of value and self-respect within.

The second Maleficent film, currently in cinemas, beautifully tells the story of our modern world, which wants to empty reality of fairies, enchantment and a magical world. In one scene, a fairy whose wings have been cut off and who has become a scientist in a laboratory discovers a powder that turns fairies into inanimate nature when scattered upon them. When she tests it on a beautiful fairy, the fairy is instantly transformed into a dandelion, a symbol of nature stripped of enchantment. Later, the humans who seek to conquer the land of the fairies, under the banner of rationalism and with a materialist outlook, fill their weapons with this powder in order to empty the world of its enchanted spirit.