holy bones

by Teri Martin

At the base of the spine, there is a large, triangular block of bone. Actually, five fused vertebrae, the sacrum supports the vertebral column, balances the load across the pelvis, distributes it equally to the limbs below, and provides skeletal housing for procreative, generative organs. 

The Greeks called this hieron osteov, the “holy bone”, from associations of the bone with ancient “sacred” mysteries; the sacrum was the part of the animal that was sacrificed to the gods. Many ancients believed it served as bodily housing for those aspects unseen but potently evident within and about us, a temple for the human soul. 

And, eventually the word sacrum came to serve as the Latin translation for the Greek mysteriov, things hidden and secret. Given not only the sacrum’s association with mysterious creative and re-creative forces, but also the strength of the bone and its capability to hold the body upright, it was considered the essential part needed to allow the body to rise from the dead.

As if a “womb for the tomb”, the sacrum and other holy bones have been placed with ritual intentionality in burial sites for 30,000 years. It would seem, then, that there is a mystery of creativity embedded in the very marrow of our bones. 

We declare our Mystery of God service to be highest of the high services. While we don’t always give explanations for these big declarations, the Prayer to the Mystery of God and all the contemplations around it, serve as sacrum, a holy vessel of ritual strong enough to uphold the vertebral column of all that we declare to be essential and true for human life as expressed in the Nine Foundations and Missions of Christuman. 

The Mystery of God service is our hieron osteov, a vatic experience of the beauty and truth of that which is ineffable; a sacral temple for the deep seminal wells from which arise our co-creative responses to the unresolved contraries and paradoxes of each of our individual lives.

This highest of our high services gives expression to our homage to the deepest ineffability of our lives – serves as “womb of the tomb,” wherein by “the love of the Christ in us for the earth of us, the human soul of each of us is born” and “where out of the death of the least of us is born the best of us and we each become at one with all that is human and with all that is divine.” In this our Prayer of the Mystery of God, we enter the very sacrum of our One God, our humankind, all believed and all beloved. 

For from these ancient holy bones, some 30,000 years ago, man’s uprightness and free agency; and from these ancient holy bones, the recognition of realities seen and unseen. Out of these holy bones, the longings for the transcendent arising as if soundings from a beloving entombed in sacral caverns, ancient and deep. In this very sounding that arrives and arises in us and out of us today, we freely choose to respond and participate in the mystery of creation, free play with all those particles set in motion in time before time. 

May we pause this month to consider that we are not merely chance happenings, but free agents, doers of beauty, co-creators of a new song— each and every day— of all that is eternal and all that is universal. May we hear the soundings that arise in us and this day, choose the form of rituals ancient yet made new in each of us: of chimes, of prayer and altar bells, music, poetry and movement. 

We give expression to our deepest beloving of the Universal and Holy Spirit, who has been called by many names—including our own—and beloved through all Human history. With the dawn of each morning, we receive the invitation to participate in the mysterious re-creation of the world, and we believe, that the creative Spirit, joins in the dance with us, sings with us the song embedded in and arising from the very marrow of our holy bones, humankind’s hierov osteov—this ineffable God joins in the prayer with us to the mystery of this holy Be-ing, all believed and all beloved.

—Message from Mystery of God High Service (2013)