DW's Blog

The Sanctity and Sacredness of Life

by DW Green — February 11, 2026

“Everything IS what it IS, and what it IS, is its Meaning.”

THE GLASS CASE

There’s a way we treat sacred things. We place them behind glass. We lower our voices around them. We approach with reverence, with caution, with the quiet dread of someone holding a priceless vase—terrified of the sound it might make if it slips.

We do this with religious relics. With ancient texts. With grandmother’s china.

And somewhere along the way, we started doing it with life itself.

We decided that if life is sacred—and it is—then it must be fragile. That if something is holy, it must be handled with fear. That the proper posture before the divine is one of paralysis: don’t touch. Don’t break it. Don’t get too close.

But what if the sacred isn’t fragile at all? What if it’s the opposite? What if life is so holy, so resilient, so infinitely generous that it wants to be touched, tasted, felt, heard, seen, and known?

What if the greatest disrespect we can show the sacred is to leave it under glass?

SANCTITY: THE STATE OF BEING HOLY

Sanctity. The state or quality of being holy.

Holy doesn’t mean distant. Holy doesn’t mean untouchable. The word holy shares a root with whole. To recognize something as holy is to recognize it as complete—lacking nothing, needing nothing added, already full.

This moment right now is holy. Not because something extraordinary is happening, but because something ordinary is happening—and ordinary, seen clearly, is extraordinary. The breath entering your lungs. The light falling on the page. The hum of the refrigerator in the next room. All of it. Holy. Whole.

To recognize the sanctity of life daily is to notice. That’s all. Not to achieve a state of spiritual elevation. Not to perform holiness. Just to notice what’s already here. To embrace each moment as a gift. To stand in the enormity of NOW and let it be enormous.

We don’t make life sacred by treating it carefully. Life already is sacred. We just keep forgetting.

SACRED: CONNECTED WITH GOD

Sacred. Connected with God, or dedicated to a religious purpose, and so deserving .

That word at the end stops me. Deserving .

Deserving of what? Of reverence, yes. Of awe. Of protection. But also—and this is the part we tend to skip—deserving of participation . Deserving of engagement. Deserving of our full, messy, imperfect, wholehearted presence.

A sacred object sitting on a shelf, never touched, is not being honored. It’s being abandoned. The incense that’s never burned. The bell that’s never rung. The prayer that’s never spoken. These things are meant to be used. The sacred comes alive in the using—in the -ING of it. The burning. The ringing. The praying. The living.

God didn’t give us this gift of life so we could admire the wrapping paper.

THE SCAREDNESS OF LIFE

Here’s the honest part. There’s a scaredness to life too.

We approach the sacred with caution because we’re afraid. Afraid of breaking something. Afraid of not being worthy. Afraid that if we touch this holy thing with our clumsy hands, we’ll destroy it. That if we play with the gift, we’ll lose it.

We build glass cases around our relationships, our health, our joy—protecting them so fiercely that we forget to actually live them. We tiptoe around the people we love, holding back the words that need to be said because we’re afraid of what happens if we say them. We treat our own lives like museum exhibits: look, but don’t touch.

But the sacred was never meant to be preserved. It was meant to be experienced . Touched. Tasted. Felt. Heard. Seen. Known.

You cannot break what is infinite. You cannot shatter what is whole. The only way to dishonor the gift of life is to refuse to unwrap it.

A UNIQUE INGREDIENT

Here is what I’ve come to see: we are each a unique ingredient in the recipe of life.

Not spectators watching from behind glass. Not curators arranging the sacred on shelves. Ingredients. Part of it. Elements of it. Mixed into the batter, inseparable from the whole.

You don’t stand outside the recipe and admire it. You’re in it. Your particular flavor—your humor, your kindness, your grief, your joy, your terrible parking skills, your morning coffee, your tears while reading an ode—all of it goes in. All of it matters. All of it is the recipe becoming itself.

Remove one ingredient, and the whole thing changes. Not because any single ingredient is more important than another, but because the recipe requires all of them to be what it is.

Everything IS what it IS. And what it IS, is its Meaning.

You are what you are. And what you are is sacred. Not because you earned it. Not because you achieved it. Because you are it. A unique, unrepeatable expression of the infinite, showing up right here, right now, as you.

PERMISSION TO PLAY

What if the most reverent thing we could do with this sacred life is play with it?

Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But joyfully. The way a child plays—fully absorbed, completely present, unselfconscious, unworried about breaking things because they haven’t yet learned to be afraid of the gift.

Watch Iris and Sam at the dinner table on Christmas Eve. Watch them ring the bells. Watch them absorb the moment without analyzing it. They’re not treating the evening as sacred in the way adults do—with gravity and solemnity. They’re treating it as sacred the way God might—with delight.

Delight is the proper posture before the sacred. Not fear. Not caution. Not the paralysis of someone holding a priceless vase. But the wide-eyed wonder of someone who has just realized: this is a gift , and I’m allowed to open it.

Don Nakata knew this. His favorite saying was “dance like no one’s watching.” And he was dancing the night that he died. Not preserving life. Not protecting it behind glass. Dancing it.

CODA: THE ENORMITY OF NOW

The sanctity of life is not a concept to understand. It is a reality to recognize.

Right now. This breath. This light. This ordinary, extraordinary moment.

It doesn’t need our protection. It needs our participation.

It doesn’t need our fear. It needs our presence.

It doesn’t need to be placed behind glass. It needs to be touched, tasted, felt, heard, seen, and known.

The gift of life was never meant to sit on a shelf. It was meant to be played with. Wept over. Laughed through. Shared. Lived.

Recognizing this—daily, moment by moment—is not a spiritual achievement. It is simply waking up to what’s already here.

The sacred was never behind glass.

It was always in your hands.

Notes IN Being.

Always NOW. Always ON.