Dear Inner Circle,

With my coffee in hand this morning I was confronted by a large man wearing a football jumper and shorts with a kindly, beautiful face, blocking my way. He took off his bracelet and said, “Can you bless this Father?”

When I was younger, requests like this caused me the greatest discomfort because it came close to the superstitious hocus-pocus that I thought it was my duty to blow away rather than create. I remember the moment when I learned that objects can take on a sense of the sacred. Years ago late one night, I sat with a couple who agonised their way through a story of unfaithfulness. The man had slept with the woman’s best friend. It was betrayal on a grand scale. The most painful moment of the night was when the husband confessed to sleeping with the wife’s friend in their own bed. I was puzzled that the betrayal seemed worse because it took place on the marital bed. The bed was an object of special, even sacred, significance. I began to understand that things and places can be made sacred by human acts.

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