Coversation #10 - When do I experience sacred?

I find it interesting that this question is "...sacred" and not "...the sacred."  I have often heard the words "the sacred" used to talk about a way of experiencing God as person, force, object, etc.  Without the definite article, it does bring in a new element.  The word sacred is defined as "something connected with God [or gods] or dedicated to a religious purpose and so deserving veneration."  In the dictionary I used, it is an adjective and not a noun (proper or otherwise).  So, this question has a bit of a different slant than it could.

For me, I started initially working through a long list of "times of experiencing sacred" and came up with about 20 things and it still felt incomplete.  It felt like there were moments missing and ones that I couldn't even remember specifically and yet felt like they were missing.

The word sacred has a sense of holy, set-apart, unique, unusual, unexpected, beautiful to me.  Sacred comes in where these things interact with daily life.  But what is most important to remember is that daily life is not just a process of getting from one sacred point to another, but instead a daily living in the midst of the sacredness of life.  Too often, I think we live where we separate "sacred" from "secular" and give the sense that the two are completely separate.  I think reality is far different, however, as sacred-ness is all around us and it is us seeking to be tuned into the sacredness that is there.

In this sense, its not that much different from the radio, television, wifi, etc waves that are all around us - we may not see them, but when we are tuned in, we pick them up clearly and are connected to something beyond ourselves.  I think sacred is like that in a far more important and life changing way.  Sacred is in the air around us and its a lifelong process of being tuned into it around us.