When the Foundation Breaks

Only a few things were ever truly sacred to me as a child. I trusted in a God I could not see, in a Bible I was told he had written, and, being fortunate, in the visible, unbreakable bond of marriage between my mother and father. All of it worked, all of it made sense, for a while. Until I studied, and learned, and witnessed, that for most of the Christian community I had grown up supporting, neither God, nor the Bible were actually taken seriously, or honestly. Both were being used as elements and pawns of human convenience, for proving points and ignoring others, for claiming victories and rationalizing tragedies.

So I shifted in my thirties and now forties. Still believing in God, and some measure of intelligent design, even holding deference for the nuances and the beauty of biblical text, I set those things mostly aside and found myself more enamored with our impervious American Constitution, a document written not by deities, but by thoughtful pragmatists. I turned to history, and political science, striving to become as thoughtful an idealist, as engaged a citizen as I believed the Founders would have wanted. And that worked, again, for a while. Until I realized that the mechanisms established by that constitution, with equal branches, each meant to hold the other accountable, were no longer truly sacred to all the members of those branches. Until it became clear that another once sacred document was now a neglected pawn on a board of made up pieces, each doing anything and everything it decided was right in the moment, with no check on ethics or the legality of conduct.

The reason we cling to sacred things is because we need something stable, something reliable, something that won’t change, or break, or bend under pressure or duress. Because we need a measure, a yardstick that tells us and helps us to distinguish between right and wrong. Remove those sacred things, be it God, the Bible, or the US Constitution, and I find myself asking a logical question of myself and my friends and my family.

What else is still left to consider sacred?

The one sacred thing I have not lost, since childhood, is a belief in the purities and the affections and the vows of a healthy marriage. I got lucky. My parents are still together. And happy. My wife’s parents are still together. And happy. Even my wife and I, now in our seventeenth year, are attached at the hip and very much in love. And happy. I concede that my views of marital sanctity are rare, that a great many marriages are in constant turmoil, or entirely broken. But it’s all I’ve really got left. At least in terms of having something solid, something permanent, something unbreakable to stand on.

So I ask again… what else is still sacred… to you?