Resurrecting The Sacred

“Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world,” he explained, “they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.” G. K. Chesterton

We’re officially embedded in a post-sacred world.

We have rejected what was a once reverent relationship with mysticism and awe and instead, embraced a world of lesser gods.

David Foster Wallace, a writer and modern-day philosopher who tried desperately to make meaning of life in this new, post-sacred world, wrote that, “We are wired for worship.”

The minute I read that quote I knew it to be true.

What we’re seeing, though, in our brave new world is a very different kind of worship.

New ‘religions’ have popped up in place of the old religions; namely, politics, medicine, ideology and technology.

All of these ‘gods’ have replaced that one immaterial essence that historically shaped this world that we live in.

British writer Paul Kingsnorth refers to this departure from the sacred and this space of new worship as “The Machine.”

The Machine effectively holds the aforementioned ‘new religions’…politics, medicine, ideology and technology. It is the swivel of our attention to these phenomenon that would bring about a decline in our relationship with the immaterial…the intangible…The Holy.

Of course there is good reason behind the push to make these new religions the centre of our universe. For one, they make their stakeholders very, very wealthy; not to mention powerful.

If the makers of tech, for example, can grab and hold our attention - which they have - this works very well in their favour.

But it does something else.

It dims the mysticism and the awe that once flowed freely through our collective veins.

Video games, social media algorithms, online avatars, filters that change our faces, platforms that give even the crudest of us a voice…all of this gives us the one thing we are most terrified of.

It gives us the illusion of control.

Please note the truth bomb in this statement…the illusion of control.

In more reverent times, no one had the illusion of control. In fact, it is fair to say that in these reverent times, the practice was decidedly submissive…it was surrendered.

Before Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead,” and our post-modern era ushered in new gods, we did not embody any illusion of control. And this did not mean we were slaves to a higher order.

Rather, we were devotional; held; moved by the very heart that created us.

It was a heart-centred time that believed in the mystical; believed in an ordered Universe.

It brought our attention, again and again, back to the interior. In fact, it knew that when our focus was on the interior…on the Sacred…that the outside rearranged itself effortlessly.

I wonder if you feel, as I do, that there is something deeply missing in our modern landscape; that there is a hole in the heart of humanity and we seem to keep looking in the wrong direction.

Perhaps it is time to do something radical.

Radical but ancient.

Perhaps it is time to find out what is truly, deeply Sacred to us.

Of course that will look different to each seeker. And yet, I’m guessing that it will have the same backbone.

I’m guessing it will look something like eternal truth…God…soul…love.

If you are struggling, with anything, give something new a try.

Try igniting the Sacred. In your way.

Let the world go for a while and return to that silent space from which the whole world burst forth.