I don’t use the word “hallow” much.  Practically never.  I might change that.

I’m familiar with the idea of hallowed ground, of course, but I can’t remember ever describing anyplace as such.  And I know the phrase “Hallowed be Thy name” from my Christian upbringing, but I can’t imagine saying anything like that except in the very specific context of the Lord’s Prayer.

I don’t know of any other applications for the word, or idiomatic expressions that use it.  Except for Hallowe’en, of course, which is why I’m chewing on it now.

In my two examples — hallowed ground, hallowed name — the word is an adjective.  An adjective that implies a past tense verb — something has been hallowed.  Hallowing is something that happened before, that was arranged or taken care of or determined by someone or something else. Add to this the fact that the word itself sounds stiff and archaic — especially if you turn the last two letters into an extra syllable as we Methodists did, “hallow-éd” — and it sounds even more like a bygone thing.

So it can feel like our participation, if we participate at all, is always only after the fact of hallowing.  A place, a ground, already has been hallowed — probably long, long ago — and I can go there or not.  A name, an idea, has been hallowed — again, in antiquity — and I can speak it with reverence and prayerfulness, or not.

Which is fine.  There’s nothing wrong with honoring passed-down traditions about what’s sacred. 

But that doesn’t have to be the whole story.  We don’t have to relate to it like that, or not only like that.  

WE CAN HALLOW STUFF.

To hallow means, basically, to make something holy.  To bless it. To recognize or declare it as sacred.  It comes from the Proto-Indo-European root for Health — “whole, uninjured, of good omen.”  

Which reminds me of the Ernest Holmes quote, “There is nothing to be healed, only truth to be revealed.”  There is nothing to be made holy, really; our work is just to reveal the essential holiness of all of it.  Which is a very fine idea. I dig it.  

AND, too… I think there might be some power in approaching life with a sense of our own creative juice to make it holy.  To actively choose to make things sacred and special. To lift up the world, and to lift ourselves up in the process.

It can be touching and inspiring to consider that the true nature of everything, the Spiritual Truth of Everything, is that it’s already-hallowed.  But that’s really not how it feels most of the time.  Frankly, it seems like a pretty big leap from my actual living experience to that idealized notion that everything, literally everything, is holy.  My everyday relationship with the world is that there are some aspects of life that feel a hell of a lot more holy, healthy, and blesséd than others.  

So, the rub is:  if we say “It’s ALL holy,” then how do we reckon with those parts of it that seem to fall far short of Divine Perfection?

If we leave it with just saying, reciting, that it’s all already hallowed, then it might feel as if our spiritual practice is simply about getting ourselves with that old program.  Like, it’s already done — get with it.  Like, there might be something wrong with me if I’m not already seeing the shimmering Oneness of everything all the time. Like, I’d better fix myself in order to experience it.
 
Or we could take a different approach.  We might say — sure, it’s all perfect in the Mind and Heart of the Infinite, but down here in reality, we’ve got a ways to go.  So I’m going to do my best to hallow the shit out of it. I can hallow myself and everything simply by choosing myself and everything.

It could be some of both.  We could deliberately look for what’s already bright and beautiful — AND — do our best to lift up the rest. 

I think those are two facets of the same act: loving it.

In honor of Día de los Muertos, we will have an ofrenda, an altar table, at service this Sunday. You are invited to bring photos and mementos of departed loved ones, to help us remember that all those who have come before are always with us in sacred space. And I’m very excited to welcome back Las Flores del Valle as our musical guests!

I can’t wait to see you. XO, Drew

©2025 Drew Groves