You have very likely done something that has been repeated across centuries, even across millennia. You look at something, or hold something and let it connect you to someone that made it, or used it, or even loved it. You go to visit a place where you used to live, or where someone you know, or someone famous once lived. These things, these places, feel like they have a special weight. They don’t just remind you. They create an experience inside you as you hold them, look at them, visit them. Maybe you are able to know again something about yourself, or something about another person.
In the past, and still today in some faith traditions, a person would kneel or bow toward a bone, a strip of cloth, a fragment of wood, or a grave site. This was, and still is, called veneration. It’s not worship, and not magic. It’s an acknowledgement that matter has a relationship to the immaterial, to memory, and even to the spiritual and invisible.
I want to use the word veneration, if you can strip away from it any sense of worship, or idolatry. Think of it as allowing yourself to know the value of what and who that thing or place represents. But if that word, veneration, carries too much baggage for you, then use the word cherishing in your mind.
If you don’t come from a faith tradition that does veneration (I don’t myself) then you may see the bowing or veneration as a bit over the top. Maybe it seems superstitious, that it belongs to an older and dark age, not the one we’re living in. I know that feeling, that sense of strangeness and skepticism about bowing or veneration.
But here’s the thing: psychology discovered the same truth, just centuries later and in a clinical setting.
Let me tell you about Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who spent his life studying the inner life of children. He looked at the ways we hold on to safety and love and other immaterial valuable things like care and attention. This especially comes into play when the people who gave us those valuable things are no longer present.
Winnicott noticed that a baby clings to a blanket, a bit of cloth, or a soft toy. It becomes a transitional object—a bridge between the security of the mother and the emerging sense of self, the self that will need to one day function apart from the mother. The object carries comfort, continuity, and the invisible warmth of relationship. The object is not the mother, but somehow it plays a role in that connection to her.
Adults don’t outgrow this need. It just matures and spreads to more socially approved objects. We keep wedding rings, letters, worn Bibles, rosaries, the tools of a loved one’s trade or hobby. Maybe it’s the slippers someone used to wear, or the pocket knife they always had with them. We visit a place and feel connected by the role it played in a person’s life.
All of these are our lay relics, validated only by our choice instead of by any church structure. They are small attempts at continuity in a culture that constantly replaces what’s been used. Even our phones, filled with faces and voices, function as digital reliquaries.
Our embodiment, our incarnation, demands touching and seeing directly with our immediate senses. We are not just minds that keep being inhibited and distracted by the body. We have, and in some sense are, a body, while also being more than a body, but not less.
So the ancient and the psychological meet in the need we have or the attraction we feel toward objects or places. Veneration and attachment, relic and transitional object, are two ways of describing the same human need: to make continuity visible, to hold what connects us to what we love.
Let’s go back long before Winnicott now and build our way back to him and his ideas.
In the medieval world, in that gesture of holding, cherishing, or veneration, a truth we’ve half or wholly forgotten was recognized: matter carries memory. Touch itself can be a form of knowing.
For the pilgrim who had walked miles to reach a reliquary, holiness was not abstract. It was something to live with and even live in. The world was porous. Grace, or something divine, could be felt, known, or met, through wood, stone, or skin.
But the Reformation changed the terms of that trust.
When the reformers moved through Europe in the 16th century, they cleared altars of bones and splinters, stripped walls of icons, and placed a Bible where the reliquary once stood. The holy object became a dangerous thing—a temptation to idolatry, or at least a distraction, as they saw it, from the real source.
From then on, holiness, and our experience of meeting God, would live in words and inward conviction, not in wood or bone. Touch was demoted; faith became invisible, untouchable.
This wasn’t just a theological movement. It was a shift in the human imagination that was reprogramming what we thought contact could mean. Matter became mute and devoid of mystery. The sacred and spiritual, once tangible, now retreated into the mind.
Over the following centuries, the world grew more mechanical and more controllable and the soul became more private. Science, ironically given birth by a belief in a reasonable Creator, proclaimed that matter was passive and held no mystery, no meaning; faith was redefined further as personal feeling, moving more and more away from the outer life and from the senses. The outer and the inner split like continents drifting apart.
The sociologist Max Weber called it the disenchantment of the world.
But the human body never stopped wanting to hold something. The hands still reached out—for tokens, for photographs, for worn bits of fabric. And one day, in a very different setting, a British pediatrician named Winnicott noticed and brought to us the idea of the transitional object.
But what if we stopped treating that impulse as weakness, and began treating it as spiritual intelligence? What if we stopped banishing it as mere sentimentality?
We have not lost the capacity for reverence.
We’ve only lost the language.
Try this small daily ritual:
Today hold one small thing that belonged to someone, or visit one place they loved, and say to it:
I remember you. You hold their presence. You were changed by their hands, their use, their love. And I want to be changed by the same presence that changed you.
The body remembers what the mind forgets.
Presence can live in the physical world without superstition or magic, or idolatry.
This is a ritual that allows for material things to share in the transformation we all want to believe in.
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