Mystery: Finally, there is the matter of mystery and significance. Eliade suggests right from the start of his book that the sacred domain is founded on the experience of something that is awesome, awe-ful and awe-inspiring. He brings in Rudolph Otto’s description of the Sacred, which is terrifying and related to confrontation with overwhelming power, and compelling, fascinating, and mysterious. In many ways, all professions align with this sense of the sacred. There is always something “remarkable” about observing a skilled and experienced professional do their job—especially when their work impacts our lives.
The architect takes our ill-formed ideas about the space in which we want to live and crafts a structure that responds beautifully to what we want (and perhaps meets a need we didn’t even know we had). The social worker carefully but quickly moves through all the paperwork and provides us with the necessary assistance. Psychotherapy helps to clear away our emotional debris. We move to a new sense of hopefulness and constructive agency. We leave behind a chaotic mess, a set of vague yearnings, or a restrictive armament (constructed of outdated assumptions about ourselves and our world).
These challenges are sacred. The outcomes can be not just transformative (as we have already mentioned) but, in some sense, “miraculous.” Thus, for these reasons, professional work can be considered sacred and should be appreciated and engaged from this perspective. However, professionals live in the real world and are subjected to the many restrictions (as well as opportunities) that those in the secular realm must face.
Professional as Profane
We find that professions play an important role in the functioning of virtually all 21st Century societies. Burton Bledstein (1976) has even suggested that the professions have replaced class and racial distinctions in many societies. With this sense of a dominant professional culture pervading our global community comes a broad and complex set of regulations and restrictions that differentiate the “professional” in specific fields from “lay people” who might provide the same services but without license or credibility.
Medical, clinical and scientific professionals populate this culture—as do accountants, architects, teachers and various other vocations in mid-21st Century life. Most of this culture’s members in health-related fields hold death as the ultimate but inevitable foe. The scientific and medical professions gave over the task of understanding the meaning of life and death many years ago to religious and spiritual practitioners and the alternative culture while they focused on the disease processes that happen to bodies. In this, they have been hugely successful.
As a result of the efforts of health care professionals, countless numbers of people have been cured, their lives extended, and their mobility stabilized if not returned fully to them. While the matter of life-and-death is not in the hands of other professionals, we have witnessed the establishment of standard accounting procedures, the design of earthquake resistant structures and the creation of digitally mediated educational programs.
Exciting new answers emerge from the problem-solving of this culture’s professions. Practices improve. Harmful quackery is questioned and eliminated. A host of competent people labor in richly textured jobs. Professionals are proud of the work they do—especially when faced with managing the anxiety associated with their work –whether it be the treatment of an illness, design of a safe high-rise apartment house, preparation for an audit, or introducing a new interpretation of Moby Dick. Big anxiety or small anxiety—skillful interpersonal engagements are required.
