Om, the vocal essence of the universe according to various South Asian religions 

Even if one does not accept the Church’s truth claims, it clearly has a knack for tapping into deep, primordial religious themes and principles that pop up across time and space. One of these is what I’m going to call capital-S and lowercase-s sacred objects and symbolism. (There may be a more formal term in the anthropology of religion for this distinction that I’m not aware of, but these terms should suffice for our purposes). 

The lower-case s sacred symbols and objects are ones that we would not feel any compunction about throwing in the dumpster if they were worn out. In our own case, if a pamphlet with the Church’s name in the official typography was torn up, I wouldn’t feel any hesitation about throwing it out in the way that I would with, for example, temple garments, which have more of a per se, intrinsic, capital-S Sacredness. (The distinction I’m drawing here perhaps fits into the Pacific Island religious concept of tapu that denotes the same intrinsic Sacred apartness, and yes, that’s the word from which we get taboo, but the English word has come to mean something different).

I’ll even go so far as to say that the sacrament bread as a symbol fits into the former category, as the deacons throw it out once it’s done. For Catholics, however, there is a whole process for respectfully disposing of blessed communion wafers akin to our process of disposing of old garments. (Even the term “symbol” can be a misnomer, as a symbol represents something else, whereas for Catholics the Eucharist is the thing itself.) Similarly, Orthodox icons and Hindu statues have an embedded divine essence that make them more than a prayer aid. Finally, for many faiths, although not ours–scripture is an example of this, with the Sikh’s Guru Granth occupying a position not only as holy writ, but as an eternal Guru (prophet-figure) itself that a couple circumambulates as they are being married (fun aside: I went to a Sikh wedding once where it looked like there was a brief struggle between the bride, who wanted to walk around it side-by-side with her husband, and the religious officiaters, who wanted him to lead). The Torah scrolls in a synagogue similarly have a level of reverence reserved for them that approximates that reserved for the Catholic Eucharist, with a series of regulations about storing, moving, and handling them. 

In many instances these Sacred symbols are not physical objects, but actual geometric designs. For us the closest analogue that we have are the temple symbols. While nobody is bothered by the idea that the Christus statue came out of a graphic design office, as inspired as those professionals might be, some people are still skittish, rightly or wrongly, about the connection between Freemasonry and the temple symbols. With capital-S Sacred shapes and geometries, we’re more comfortable with the operating assumption that they came directly from God than by the prospect that God infused them with sacrality after they had been created by humans.  

My understanding is that the name of God in Arabic is one such Sacred design for Islam, where they have certain norms and regulations about where it is placed and what one can do with it. Similarly, in some versions of Jewish mysticism Hebrew letters are embedded with spiritual energy (which I assume is the inspiration for the fokloric Jewish story of the Golem clay figure being brought to life with Hebrew letters), and in Taoism there are Sacred symbols used in incantations.

Similarly, the Sanskrit script for Om, the syllable that according to various South Asian religions contains the essence of the universe, has an intrinsic sacrality that extends beyond, say, a Jesus fish. However, for Om it is the sound itself that is Sacred. The closest thing we have to Sacred sound is the Sacred name in the temple. Similar to how the ancient Hebrews could only say the unedited name of God in very particular circumstances in the temple, we have our analogue in modern day temples. In a sense before the Adamic language components were removed from the Endowment we even had our equivalent of a Sacred phrase in a Sacred language in a Sacred place. 

Of course the line between lowercase and uppercase S sacred isn’t always clear. I remember as a teenager being told that the Holy of Holies was the one room where only the President of the Church was allowed into, and then I heard somewhere that there is a janitor that’s also allowed access and that it’s more of a personal prayer room for the Church President, and that somehow made it less cool and reified to my teenage mind than the old school, High Priest-only on pain of divine smiting Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. (To be clear, I don’t actually know what the janitorial situation is for the Salt Lake City Holy of Holies). It would become exhausting if everything was capital-s Sacred, but that is one aspect of faith that I hope does not completely dissipate with modernity.