“Human beings are not just biological or social creatures. We are meaning-making beings who organize our world around what we experience as sacred.” - Mircea Eliade

Eliade is naming something I’ve had to come to terms with in my own life, often the hard way. We don’t just live in reality, we structure it. We assign weight, significance, and centrality to certain people, ideas, and narratives, and then we build our lives around them as if that meaning were already there. What we call “sacred” is usually whatever we’ve made untouchable because too much depends on it.

And for a long time, I didn’t see that I was doing this. I thought I had found what was ultimately true, ultimately real, ultimately worth orienting my life around. I didn’t realize how much of that “sacredness” had been handed to me, reinforced, and protected by the systems I was part of. It felt absolute. It felt like it came from somewhere beyond question.

That’s the power of the sacred. Once something carries that kind of weight, you stop seeing it clearly. You start organizing your life around it. It becomes the reference point for everything else, what you trust, what you defend, what you’re willing to sacrifice for. And when it’s challenged, it doesn’t feel like an idea is being questioned. It feels like your world is being threatened.

I’ve also learned that the sacred doesn’t go away when you step outside religion. It relocates. I’ve watched it happen in myself and in others. We move it into politics, identity, relationships, even into our own sense of self. We elevate something, load it with meaning, and then depend on it to hold things together for us.

And that’s where it starts to break down.

Whatever we make sacred eventually fails under the weight we put on it. Not because it’s bad, but because we’ve asked it to do something it was never capable of doing. And when it fails, it doesn’t just feel disappointing. It feels destabilizing. Like something fundamental has been pulled out from under us.

So for me, the question is no longer whether I have something sacred in my life. I know I do. The question is whether I can see what I’ve made sacred, and be honest about the role it’s playing. Whether I’ve handed it the job of holding my life together on autopilot so I don’t have to.

There’s a shift that happens when you see this clearly. Not into meaninglessness, but into responsibility. Not into emptiness, but into a more grounded relationship with reality. Where meaning is no longer something I inherit or defend, but something I participate in, consciously, imperfectly, and without pretending it’s absolute.

Jim Palmer