“And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightening by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.” (The Everlasting Man, Hodder & Stoughton, 1939, p.188)

G.K. Chesterton wrote those words more than sixty years ago. One of the things that, for him, gave the church credibility is the fact that, invariably, it is surrounded by a halo of hatred.

I quote his words not as an attempt to offer an apologia for the church today as it suffers through a period within which it is frequently an object of intense hatred. Defensiveness is not the purpose here since I am one of those persons who is not entirely sorry that a lot of anger is currently being directed towards us in the church. Some of this anger is justified, after a few centuries of privilege, and all of it will, I submit, be helpful in fuelling an important period of purification within the church. I would rather be a priest in a time of anti-clericalism than in a time within which priests and church are unduly privileged since it is far easier to live the gospel in the former situation. Thus, we, inside the church, should have a curious gratitude for all that anger that is being directed against us today. Besides, as Chesterton points out, paraphrasing Jesus, the church will always be hated.

The point here is not to defend the church, but to make a critical point about God and the theology of God – a theology which is often grossly misunderstood.

And the point is this: Christianity is the only religion which worships the scapegoat, the one who is hated, excluded, spat upon, blamed for everything, ridiculed, shamed, and made expendable. Christianity is the only religion that focuses on imitating the victim and which sees God in the one who is surrounded by the halo of hatred.

There are some important lessons to be learned from this, not the least of which has to do with where we see God, truth, and goodness. We need, today, some correctives since we live in a culture which, not unlike most cultures in the past, scapegoats some persons to the benefit of the others and then identifies God and holiness with those who have created the scapegoats.

God is not to be confusedly identified with the myths of success, power, glamour, and popularity. Never confuse God and what is holy with current cultural religion which, antithetical to Christ, worships the included, the glamorous, the ones who aren’t shamed and ridiculed, and the ones who seem important and indispensable. The God of our culture and the God that is preached in so many of our churches is not the God who dies on a cross, is hated, spat upon, and is excluded and scapegoated in ignorance. No, our culture does not worship a crucified God. The God Jesus revealed, is still, in our very own culture, excluded, mocked, scapegoated, made expendable, and often killed, mostly in the name of God and truth. Where do we see this?

Our own culture, like every other culture past and present, creates a category of persons that it deems expendable and then subsequently victimizes through exclusion, ridicule, scapegoating, and often through actual death. Who constitutes that category shifts slightly from time to time, but there is always a common denominator, it includes always those who are the weakest.

Thus, for instance, our culture, marginalizes and scapegoats the sick, the poor, the handicapped, the unborn, the unattractive, the non-productive, and the aged. These we deem expendable and subsequently decertify in terms of full status within the human race. Worse still, we identify God and holiness with those who are doing the excluding. But that is antithetical to true religion – and true wisdom.

Where is God? God is on the side of the victim, standing with the one who is excluded, specially present in the one being ridiculed, and dying in the one who is being put to death.

True Christianity knows this: It worships the scapegoat – the one who is surrounded by the halo of hatred.

Inside each of us, beyond what we can name, we have a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, the imprint of a love so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else. This brand lies beyond conscious memory but forms the centre of the heart and soul.

This is not an easy concept to explain without sounding sentimental. Perhaps the old myths and legends capture it best when they say that, before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness. To be in touch with your heart is to be in touch with this primordial kiss, with both its preciousness and its meaning.

What exactly is being said here?

Within each of us, at that place where all that is most precious within us takes its root, there is the inchoate sense of having once been touched, caressed, loved, and valued in a way that is beyond anything we have ever consciously experienced. In fact, all the goodness, love, value, and tenderness we experience in life fall short precisely because we already know something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged it is in fact because our outside experience is so different from what we already hold dear inside.  

We all have this place; a place in the heart, where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. From that place our own kisses issue forth, as do our tears. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to come into; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of our compassion and the place of our rage. In that place we are holy. There we are temples of God, sacred churches of truth and love. It is there too that we bear God’s image.

But this must be understood: The image of God inside of us is not to be thought of as some beautiful icon stamped inside of the soul. No. The image of God in us is energy, fire, memory; especially the memory of a touch so tender and loving that its goodness and truth become the energy and prism through which we see everything. Thus we recognize goodness and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside of us. Things “touch our hearts” when they touch us here and it is because we have already been touched and caressed that we seek for a soul mate, for someone to join us in this tender space.

And we measure everything in life by how it touches this place: Why do certain experiences touch us so deeply? Do not our hearts burn within us in the presence of any truth, love, goodness, or tenderness that is genuine and deep? Is not all knowledge simply a waking up to something we already know? Is not all love simply a question of being respected for something we already are? Are not the touch and tenderness that bring ecstasy nothing other than the stirring of deep memory? Are not the ideals that inspire hope only the reminder of words somebody has already spoken to us? Does not our desire for innocence (and innocent means “not wounded”) mirror some primal unwounded place deep within us?  And when we feel violated, is it not because someone has irreverently entered the sacred inside us?

When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities then we are feeling our souls. At those times, faith, hope, and love will be spring up in us and joy and tears will both flow through us pretty freely. We will be constantly stabbed by the innocence and beauty of children and pain and gratitude will, alternately, bring us to our knees. That is what it means to be recollected, to inchoately remember, to feel the memory of God in us. That memory is what is both firing our energy and providing us a prism through which to see and understand.

Today, too often, a wounded, calloused, cynical, over-sophisticated, overly adult world invites us to forget, to move beyond this childishness (which is really child-likeness). It invites us to forget God’s kiss in the soul. But, unless we lie to ourselves and harden ourselves against ourselves, the most dangerous of all activities, we always remember, dimly, darkly, the caress of God.

Sublimation, waiting, and chastity, these are not the virtues of our time. American educator, Allan Bloom, in his controversial book, The Closing of the American Mind, suggests that lack of chastity is, among young people, the leading cause of unhappiness. What helps make this statement interesting is that he is a purely secular analyst with no religious agenda whatsoever. The Catholic Church has always linked chastity and happiness, but lately, that message has been largely ignored and even ridiculed.

Bloom’s thesis runs something like this: “I look at the students that I teach, young twenty-year olds, and I see most everything, except happiness and erotic energy. This is a great irony; young people today tend to be erotically lame, old, even while still young. They have been everywhere, experienced everything, but they have never had anything sublime in their lives, because sublimity depends upon sublimation and sublimation depends upon waiting and waiting depends upon chastity and, whatever else they may have had in life, they have never had these: sublimation, waiting, and chastity.

Much of our unhappiness comes from our lack of chastity. But to understand that, it is important to properly define chastity.

Chastity is not celibacy and it is not primarily even a sexual concept. It has to do with how we experience things in general, not whether we have sex or not. My father and my mother were two of the most chaste persons I have ever known. Yet they were married and had sex. Conversely, I know celibates, who do not have sex, but are not chaste.

Chastity is not so much about sex as it is about reverence and respect. To be chaste is to experience in such a way as to be fully reverential and respectful. When this not done, when one is not chaste, then experience fragments and disintegrates the soul rather than builds it. Hence it is important to know that we can violate chastity as much by prematurity as by substance. Chastity is not just about what we experience, but also about when we experience it. An experience can be wrong simply because it is premature.

Thus, chastity is about waiting for the right moment for something, about living in tension and accepting incompleteness and inconsummation in life.

And this is not something at which we are very good. We have never been taught how to wait for things. Former generations, whatever their faults, were much better at this than we are. Perhaps it was not so much a question of virtue as of lack of opportunity, but, irrespective of whether it was by choice or conscription, they knew how to wait, certainly better than we do. They used to incorporate as part of their understanding of life and as part of their daily prayer the idea that, here in this world, we live and mourn in a valley of tears, that we are not to expect full fulfillment. We judge this negatively, see it as morbid, and then wonder why our kids live together before marriage and are ever so under-prepared for the frustrations that their lives and marriages invariably bring. We have given them neither the discipline of chastity nor any system of symbols by which to comprehend and accept that in this world all symphonies remain unfinished.

And they do remain unfinished. We spend 98% of our lives waiting for something else to happen to us. Very rarely do we have a moment that is fully pregnant, fully satisfying; always we are waiting. We are in one moment, but waiting for something else to happen: for the bus to come, for the meeting to end, for this day to be over with, for this season of life to be done with, for our vacation to come, to meet the right person to love and marry, to be less tired, to be in a better time and place than we are in now. Here, in this life, there is no such a thing as a clear-cut pure joy. We are always still waiting for it.

Sadly we have not been taught how to do this, how to be chaste. Sadly too, our culture lacks the honest courage to stare this square in the face. So we are paying the price, not least in the fact that today it is considered sophisticated to be cynical and nihilistic. Happiness is seen as a naiveté. So is chastity.

Bloom is right. Few things contribute as much to our unhappiness, and indeed to the breakdown of community, as does our lack of chastity. We need to learn the art of waiting, of understanding again how every tear brings the messiah closer.

It is never easy to find the balance between being and doing, prayer and work, contemplation and action, interiority and external involvement, soul craft and statecraft, mysticism and politics, piety and social action, family life and our jobs, pampering self-care and compulsive workaholism. Balance among these things is like looking for the Kingdom, a question of searching for a narrow door that few find.

Mostly we suffer from one or the other, burnout or rust-out. I know only of two kinds of persons, those with too much to do and those who do not have enough to do. I know no one whom I can look at with genuine envy and say: “He or she has it just right!” Everyone I know, myself included, is either over-pressured or is frustrated because they would like to be doing more. We lack for good models here.  Balance … to have just the right amount of work coupled with the right amount of prayer, to have a healthy combination of pressure and leisure, is a thing rarely seen.

And there are dangers here both ways, in being overinvolved and in being under-involved:

If I do not have enough interiority in my life, if my fault is over-action, then these will be my faults: I will have no identity outside of my work; I will be a workaholic, compulsive, driven, un-free; I will have no genuine prayer life; my work and social action will eventually become soulless; I will struggle with charity, patience, courtesy, and chastity; and, eventually, my life, albeit packed with many things, will contain not a thimbleful of genuine delight. I will be so absorbed with the business of making a living and establishing myself that I will never really get around to actually living and enjoying myself.

Conversely, if I do not have enough work and external activity in my life, enough pressure and demands from family, work, and community, if my fault is over-piety and one-sided contemplation, then these will be my faults: I will be living in an unhealthy isolation, in perennial delusion and illusion; I will be spaced out, unhealthily disconnected from family and community, lonely, with escapism as my drug of choice; I will narrowly identify spirituality and morality with my own piety; and I will suffer acutely from the lack of a healthy self-image since I am not actualizing my God given talents. I will reverse the Socratic axiom so that, for me, the unlived life will not be worth examining.

Given this perennial struggle for balance, it can be useful to lay out some general principles which, while not necessarily all that practical, at least help show us where, theoretically, the balance lies. I offer these somewhat apologetically, knowing that, in this area, I can hardly present myself as a paradigm.

Nonetheless, for what they are worth, here are some principles for balancing our lives:  

• Have enough interiority in life to make for mysticism, but have enough family and disruption in life to make for healthy displacement.
• Have enough interiority in life to make for soul, but have enough obligations and involvements to make for a sense of the corporate.
• Have enough solitude in life to make for enjoyment but enough dutiful work to identify you with the poor.
• Have enough withdrawal and self-care in life to safeguard health, but enough conscription and duty to let you know your life is not your own.
• Have enough of God’s agenda to let you know that this world is not ultimate, but enough of the world’s agenda to let you know that your task here is to help God shape the earth.
• Be enough at home to realize that your family is primary, but be enough in the world to let you know that the world is your ultimate family.
• Have enough involvement in prayer and church groups to be considered pious, but enough concern about politics and justice to be considered radical.
• Be enough Mary to sit, passively, at the feet of Jesus, but enough Martha to not have a privileged escape from the everyday, mundane duties of life.

William Stringfellow was once addressing a group of social justice advocates on a day when they were particularly discouraged because a key project, to which they had given considerable time and effort, had failed.

Assessing both their sincerity and their discouragement, he said something to this effect: “I am old enough to scold you. I see your passion for truth and justice, and I laud that, but I hear your discouragement too. You lament the world’s hardness of heart, and you are correct there too. However, what I don’t hear in all this are many words about the Lordship of Jesus. We talk as if we need to save the world, as if everything depends on us. Well, it doesn’t. In the resurrection of Jesus the world is already saved, the powers of death and darkness have already been vanquished. We, we only need to live in such a way so as to show that world that we believe this.”

What Stringfellow is telling us is what Jesus tried to teach, namely, that the opposite of faith is not so much unbelief and doubt in the existence of God as it is anxiety and fretless worry. The opposite of faith is what Jesus cautions Martha against: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things!”

We are not to be anxious about many things. Jesus keeps telling us not to worry – about what we will eat, about what we will wear, and about tomorrow and the problems it will bring. He tells us not to worry, not because there are no real threats to us, but because there is a Lord in charge of the universe and nothing happens, no sparrow falls from the sky or hair from a human head, that is outside the scope and care of that Lord.

We are in good hands, all the time. A gracious, all-powerful, loving God is solidly in charge and nothing will happen in the world and nothing will happen to us that this Lord is indifferent to. Our faith, at its core, invites trust, and not just abstract trust, belief that good is stronger than evil. No. To say the creed, to say that I believe in God – and originally the Christian creed was only one line, Jesus is Lord – is to have a very particularized, concrete trust, a trust that God has not forgotten about me and my problems and that, despite whatever indications there are to the contrary, God is still in charge and is very concerned with my life and its concrete troubles.

When we anxiously worry, in essence, we are denying the Christian creed because we are, in effect, saying that God has either forgotten about us or that God does not have the power to do anything about what is troubling us. It is then that we, like Martha, begin rushing around and fretting about many things.

We see the opposite of this in Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. He truly says the creed. With all the powers of death and darkness closing in on him, just when it seems that God has abandoned him and the earth, he begins his prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.”  What Jesus is saying is that, despite indications to the contrary, despite the fact that it looks like God is asleep at the switch, God is still in charge, is still Lord of this universe, is still noticing everything, and is still fully in power and worthy of trust.

This is the essence of faith, to believe that someone benign and concerned with us is ruling the universe and we can we stop our unnecessary fretting. To have faith is to believe that mother and father are home, aware of the situation, and in charge.

The trouble though is that this is hard to do, even when we do believe in a God who is Lord of the universe. Our problem is that we project our limited, selective care onto this God. We feel that God is inadequate because often we are, that God falls asleep at the switch because we occasionally do, and that God forgets about us in our problems because we have a habit of letting certain persons and things slip off of our radar screens.

You know how we are as human beings, forever letting certain things slip! We look into our closet one-day and notice a shirt or a blouse that we forgot we had. Then, we suddenly remember an invitation we were supposed to, long ago, have responded to. Things slip our minds. Our capacity to care is limited and selective. Were we Lord of the universe, many a sparrow would be forgotten and many a hair would fall to the ground unnoticed.

And so we fear that God sometimes forgets and does not notice us, that God, like us, is an inadequate Lord of the universe. That is why we get anxious and fret, because, like one without faith, we can feel that we are in an unfeeling universe.

Who is my neighbour? What does it mean to be neighbour to one another? 

Jesus once answered this by telling us the parable of the Good Samaritan. In essence, as he told it, the parable runs something like this: A man was taking a walk one day when he was beaten up by thieves and left for dead in a ditch by a road. A priest saw him there, but passed him by. Later still, a scribe also passed by without stopping to help him. Finally, a Samaritan, the kind of person you would have least expected to respond, saw him, was moved by compassion, and stopped and helped him.

One of the interesting things in this parable is that those who did not stop to help him, the priest and the scribe, did so for reasons that go far beyond the question of their individual selfishness and selflessness. They did so for certain ideological, religious reasons. Thus, the priest did not stop because he feared that the man was dead and, being a priest, if he touched a dead body he would be ritually defiled and thereby unable to offer sacrifice in the temple. The scribe had his own religious reasons for not stopping. The Samaritan, who had the least to lose religiously, was able to be moved by simple human compassion.

Given this background, the parable might, in our own language and categories, be recast to read like this:

One day a man was taking a walk in a city park when he was mugged, beaten up, and left for dead by a gang of thugs.

It so happened that, as he lay there, the provincial superior of a major religious order walked by and saw him. He realized instantly that the man was in a desperate way and he felt that he should respond. However, he thought to himself: “If I help this man, I will set a dangerous precedent. Then what will I do? Having helped him, where will I draw the line? Will I have to stop and help everyone who is in need? Will I then have to give money to every panhandler, every beggar, every charity? If I give to this one, then on what basis am I justified in refusing any charity? Where will it stop? This would be dangerous precedent. I simply cannot help everyone I see in need and, thus, it is best not to help this one. This is ultimately a question of fairness.” And thus he passed him by.

A short time later, a young woman, a theology student, happened to come along. She too saw the man lying wounded. Her first instinct was to stop and help him, but a number of thoughts made her hesitate. She said to herself: “In that course on pastoral care we just took, we were taught that it is not good to try to rescue someone. We must resist the temptation, however sincere and religiously motivated, to naively wade in and try to be someone’s rescuer. That’s simply a savior complex which doesn’t do the other person any good in the long run and comes out of a less than pure motivation besides. I would only be trying to help that person because it makes me feel good and useful. It would be a selfish act really; ultimately only this man can help himself.” She too, this person preparing for ministry, despite much good intention, passed by the wounded person.

Later still, a third person chanced to come along, the chairperson for the local diocesan commission on social justice. He too saw the wounded man and he too was, instinctually, moved. However, before he was able to reach out and touch the wounded man, a number of hard questions surfaced: “This man really is not the issue. The more important question is how he got here. What things within the larger picture  – our social and economic system – produce the conditions that make for this type of violence and hurt.  To help this man is simply a Band-Aid, solving nothing. It does not address the deeper issue of justice and why our society perpetually creates this kind of victim. To help this individual is simply to do the Mother Theresa thing, but it doesn’t solve anything really. It’s the old temptation really – it’s easier to give bread to a hungry person than it is to address the issue of hunger!” This man too, for all his dedication and sincerity, like the religious superior and the theology student before him, passed by the wounded man without stopping.

Finally, it so happened that the CEO of Texaco Oil happened to be out joy riding in the new BMW he had just purchased. He chanced to see the wounded man lying there and he stopped to have a closer look. When he saw the face of that wounded person, something in him suddenly changed. A compassion he didn’t even know he possessed took possession of him. Tears filled his eyes and, deeply moved, he got out of his car, bent over, and gently picked up the man. He carried him to his car and gently laid him in the back seat, oblivious of the fact that blood was staining the clean white upholstery. Arriving at the emergency entrance of the nearest hospital, he rushed in and hollered for the paramedics. After a stretcher had brought the man into the emergency room, they discovered that he had no medical insurance. The CEO produced a Visa Gold Card and told the hospital staff to give the wounded man the best medical attention possible money was to be no object. He promised to cover all hospital expenses.

Who was neighbour to the wounded man? 

A few years ago, a young Benedictine Monk shared with me how, for all the early years of his religious life, he had been resentful because he had to ask permission of his Abbott if he wanted anything: “I used to think it was silly, me, a grown man, supposedly an adult, having to ask a superior if I wanted something. If I wanted a new shirt, I would have to ask the Abbott for permission to buy it. I thought it was ridiculous that at thirty-five years of age I was reduced to being like a child.”

But his attitude changed: “I am not sure of all the reasons, though I am sure they have to do with grace, but one day I came to the realization that there was some spiritual wisdom in this, having to ask permission for everything. In this life, ultimately, we don’t own anything and nothing comes to us by right. Everything is gift, everything should be asked for, not taken as if owned. We should be grateful to the universe and to God, just for giving us a little space. Now, when I ask permission from the Abbott because I need something, I no longer feel like a child. No, I feel like I am more properly in tune with the way things should be, in a gift-oriented universe within which nobody has a right to ultimately claim anything.”

What this monk had, in his own way, understood is the principle that ultimately undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every one of the commandments, namely, that everything is gift, nothing can be owned or claimed really as one’s own. We should all be grateful to the universe for giving us a little space and we should be most careful not to claim, as by right, anything more.

But this goes against much within our culture and within our private inclinations. Within both of these we hear voices which tell us: If you cannot take what you want then you are a weak person; weak in a double way: First of all, you are a weak personality, too timid to be fully alive. Second, you have been weakened by religious and moral scruples and you are, at the end of the day, unable precisely to seize the day, to be fully alive. You are uptight, frigid, infantile, nothing more than a child held captive by superstitious forces. Why don’t you grow up!

It was precisely those kinds of voices that this monk heard during his younger years and it because of what they were saying he was resentful and felt immature.

But I am not so sure that Jesus would agree with these voices. I am not so sure that Jesus would look on so much that is assertive, aggressive, and accumulative within our society, despite the admiration it receives, and see this as what is meant, in the healthy sense, by the expression that suggests we seize the moment. I am not so sure that Jesus would share our admiration of our rich and famous who claim, as by right, their excessive wealth and status. When Jesus states that it is harder for a rich person to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he might have mitigated this by adding: “Unless, of course, the rich person, childlike, asks permission from the universe, from the community, and from God, for every new shirt!”

When I was a religious novice, our novice master tried to impress upon us the meaning of religious poverty by making us write inside of every book that was given us the Latin words: Ad Usum. Literally, that means: For use. The idea was that, although this book was given to you for your personal use, you ultimately did not own it. It was just for your use, your temporary use, real ownership lay elsewhere. We were then told that this was true of everything else given us too for our personal use, from our toothbrushes to the shirts on our backs. They were not really ours, but merely given us for our use.

One of the young men in that novitiate eventually left the order and is today a medical doctor. He remains a close friend and he once shared with me how, even today, as a doctor, he still writes those words, ad usum, in the front of his books: “I don’t belong to a religious order. I have no vow of poverty, but the principle our novice master taught us is just as valid for me in the world as it is for a religious novice. Ultimately we don’t own anything. Those books aren’t mine, really. They’ve been given me, temporarily, for my use. Nothing belongs to anybody and it is good never to forget that!”

It is not bad being an adult who, like a child, has to ask permission to buy a new shirt. It keeps us attuned to the fact that the universe belongs to everyone, to God ultimately, and all of us should be deeply grateful just for a little space.

Twice in my life, once just before I was ordained a priest and then again just before I was installed as provincial superior of the Oblates, I had to take an oath against Modernism. It was not a big thing really; essentially it meant publicly professing the creed of the church. But there was a time, not that long ago, when this was considered a big thing and Modernism was seen as the archenemy of the church.

Times have changed and today modernism is itself under fire, from the secular world. This is making for some curious happenings: More and more, today we are seeing the phenomenon wherein the children of people who once rejected religion in the name of Modernism are taking their own oath against Modernism. The jury is still out as to whether all of this is good or bad, but, undeniably, it is interesting.

So what is happening? What is this phenomenon that many are calling Post-Modernism?

Post-Modernism is a reaction against Modernism, that is, a reaction against the belief, the ideology, that reason, critical, informed reason is the ultimate and only arbiter of truth and that it, and not religious truth, is the ultimate authority. In essence, it is a distrust of all that is not explicable in purely rational terms. This faith, the belief that critical reason is the final authority, ushered in what we call Modern Western history.

And it was a mixed blessing, both religiously and secularly. On the one hand, Modernism is good. With its faith in the rational, it has helped allay countless superstitions and groundless fear and thus has helped free the Western mind. Moreover, it lies at the basis of the scientific method and the Western science and technology would not be understandable without it.

But there was another side to it that was less freeing and it is this side that the churches feared and against which they fought. Modernism’s faith in the rational was so powerful that, in the end, it did not allow for faith in anything else. Efficiency, pragmatism, and science became the ultimate authorities and they ruled as ruthlessly as any god ever has. The facts, as science established them, became God. With that, reality flattened out and lost much of its mystery. Contemplation, ritual, and mysticism, save for a few small pockets of resistance within the churches, essentially died. Further, any kind of faith in or contact with the invisible, the non-empirical, the world of spirit, was seen as suspect or as outright superstition. Christian faith came to be seen as a naiveté, like believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny. Most of us grew up in this climate and, for many of us, it is still the basic air we breathe. We are adult children of the enlightenment.

But a curious thing is happening today, not all over, but in significant parts of the culture. More and more, reason itself is under fire and is being questioned as to how much truth and meaning it can deliver. You see this skepticism of reason everywhere, but most notably in people who once rejected religion in the name of rationality. Hence, for example, among so many persons who once rejected religion because they somehow regarded it as superstition, we see an increasing fascination with horoscopes, astrology, neo-pagan rituals, and new age religion. We see the same kind of fascination with typology: Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, archetypes  and with books that promise deeper meaning through our getting in touch with the non-rational and the mystical. Just a perusal of the titles of recent bestsellers tells you that a lot of people are looking for meaning in creeds beyond the rational: Running with Wolves; Fire in the Belly; Iron John; Women are from Venus, Men Are From Mars; The Celestine Prophecies; Goddesses in Every Woman. An hour of MTV will tell you the same thing and leave you wondering why rock artists, and their fans, find chaos so bewitching.

Each of these things, in its own way, is an oath against Modernism. Perhaps they do not always sound like the Christian creed, but they share with it the faith that our lives are not fully explained, nor fully circumscribed, by the empirical and the rational. Each of these believes in its own angels, devils, spirits, and gods, and each of these is an expression of Post-Modernism.

What goes around comes around. Some of the children of the children who once rejected religion because they thought it was too un-freeing are now rejecting their parents’ rationality because they find it too un-freeing. Welcome to post-modernity!