What’s in a holy object? Talismans, portals, anchors, containers…
When I was young, the holiest objects in my life were part of Jewish life—mezzuzahs, siddurs, torahs, teffilin, tallesim, tanachs (all these T’s). I was taught of their holiness and followed along with what I witnessed others do with them. I kissed the objects, I treasured them, I kept them in safe places, I wrapped them around my shoulders, up my left arm, placed them upon my head. There is something both ridiculous and beautiful in the way we load ourselves up to pray in full gear, the leather straps around the arm and dangling off the head, the little black boxes attached to them pulled tight to the skin, the shawl wrapped around the shoulders.
Many of these objects are considered holy because of the words written inside them. Mezzuzahs and teffillin contain scrolls with the Hebrew words of the sh’ma, that core prayer compelling us to listen to Oneness; siddurs are prayer books; Torahs contain the oldest written stories that manifest the ideas of our ancestors, made by the skilled, crafting hands of a special author called a sofer.
As someone who dedicates a lot of time to words, the notion of endowing holiness to their ancient containers—transforming these wordful objects into portals to the ancestral past, talismans for a common people, anchors to the sacred present—inspires me. But words are also limited, ephemeral. On some level, I think I unconsciously understood this as a child; most children do. What gave those words and the objects that held them power then was that the people I held in veneration—my parents, my teachers, my extended family—treated them as holy. In our fractured moment, it can be easy to forget the impact of role models, but there go our elders, and how else do our minds begin to imagine the future but in response to them?
I did have one English teacher—an observant man, a poet, who always wore a kippa on his head and a tallit katan under his shirt—who told us that it was utterly ridiculous to stand around and take turns kissing the Torah every shabbat. “I kiss my wife,” he declared, “Who, unlike the wrapping around a scroll, kisses me back.”
In the battle between belief and doubt, my gut says: default to belief. To be thought a fool by others seems not a worse fate than running afoul of deeper and invisible forces. And whatever people may think about believing, ultimately it comes down to saying, again and again, I don’t know. Imagine the magnitude of everything in the Universe that not only do you or I not know, but that nobody could possibly know. Like what a quasar tastes like or what skin becomes in the fifth dimension.
So I do trust these objects that people claim to hold powers—to be charmed, magical, healing or harming, to be somehow potent—really have those powers. And when I come upon them, I try to openly undertake the ritual attached to them and see how things unfold. I kiss the Western Wall and the Blarney Stone, I bring potatoes to the altar for Papa Legba on the Day of the Dead, I lower my eyes beside the angry Japanese buddha statues at the Art Institute of Chicago, I keep lucky stones on my writing desk, I’ve had many Tarot card readings, I’ve played more than a few games with blessed dice. At least once, I won.
About ten years ago, in a forest on the side of a mountain in North Carolina, under a stone canopy at the end of a rope bridge, I prayed to a statue of a large round feminine deity to help me find a partner. In response it mocked me.
I was visiting an intentional community called Earthaven Ecovillage near Black Mountain, NC. Five hundred acres of rushing streams, verdant forest, ten different birdcalls a day, and a community of about a hundred farmers, writers, spiritualists, builders, and outcasts. I was on a spiritual adventure around the country, and somewhere, somehow, in some place, I had every intention of falling in love. I was going to meet or see again the woman to whom I could reach out my hand and ask her if she’d take it to jump off a cliff with me, or dive into hot lava, or get shot out of cannons, and it’s what I prayed to the statue for on that afternoon. I did what I imagined one was supposed to do. I brought an offering in the form of a strangely shaped branch I found nearby, I focused on my breath and centered myself into some silence, I said complimentary things to it. And then I made my plea. It was the briefest movement but it was there, the sudden curl of the lips into a grin of pure mocking delight. A thousand birds flew out of the trees all at once in a big guffaw.
Four years later on a road trip with an artist friend of mine from Oakland, I told her the story of the statue. I was driving her to a residency just south of Canada where she was going to sculpt a series of looping pieces made of thick steel. Which is to say she has a familiarity with the power and magic of things. I told her that I thought the statue had cursed me. She laughed. Not like the statue had laughed, but like a friend laughs. “Statues can’t curse you,” she said with all the confidence of someone who knows for sure, “Not to say you didn’t see what you saw, just that they can’t curse you.” She paused, “They can become possessed though,” she added, “definitely. Sounds like maybe some jerky sprite was possessing that one, but it can’t curse you.”
I remained skeptical.
“But how can you know that for sure?” I asked her.
“Listen,” she said, “the object itself, that’s the byproduct. It can’t curse you because you’re alive and it’s stone.”
A few years after that, I met Ginny, my now wife, through a dating app. We had our first date in a bar where both of us got ginger ales. If there’s some insight to be found in this unspooling of thought and memory, maybe it’s that holiness lives not only in the objects we venerate or the prayers we offer, but in the unexpected ways life unravels. But I really can’t be sure. I can be sure that I too would rather kiss my wife than a Torah scroll. And also that I’ll try to never let a Torah scroll touch the ground.
These holy objects are "permission slip" that we establish to allow us to access the abilities and spiritual gifts already within us.