The Sacred & The Holy

"For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself." - Charles Dickens

We have officially entered this Sacred and Holy time of year. It’s Christmastime, or Advent in the Christian tradition.

The word Advent comes from the Latin, adventus, which means “coming” or “arrival.” It refers to the birth of Christ over 2000 years ago and his eventual second-coming.

But more than that, it refers to the breakthrough of God into our secularized world. A world where we’ve strayed so far from The Sacred and The Holy. And whenever we let go of God, we will replace him with something else.

After all, we are wired for worship.

It’s been a slow burn, coming to this hyper-industrialized state that we currently find ourselves in and that is the current object of worship. A world where we can upload a boyfriend, inject our faces with little bits of poison to remove wrinkles, generate essays through A.I., and never, ever, ever get bored.

The excerpt of the poem below is meant to usher us into a felt reality of the world we currently inhabit. It is a world where a centralized machine (we might refer to that as a conglomeration of money, tech, medicine and consumerism) has become the almighty.

‘Other’ a poem by R.S. Thomas  

“. . . The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.

God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.”

In order to access a Sacred Order, we require silence. We require a kind of boredom and solace that this world seems to betray. After all, just a click of the mouse opens us up to worlds beyond our own. But these techno-induced worlds are shallow.

And we are starving.

None of this Machine seems to actually check any boxes of peace or joy.

And the data is in on this. Generation Z is the most anxious generation to date. They’re also the first generation to have grown up, from birth, on technology. It seems this experiment has failed.

Even more strange is this technologically driven and automated world seems to have created this great push for conformity; for everyone to think the same, feel the same, vote the same and live the same.

To do otherwise is the newest mortal sin.

Aldous Huxley talks about this in his ground-breaking book, Brave New World, of almost 100 years ago. He writes about the “deindividualization” of humanity.

He says, “Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”

Uniformity also presents a unique challenge to our physical health. It is through the suppression of our truth - the turning our backs on ourselves - that can alter the expression of the immune system.

Autoimmunity is the bodily expression of self-betrayal. The body is mimicking the suppressed Soul. And we only get better as we find out WHO WE ARE apart from who the world is telling us to be.

This, I believe, is why the world is seeing a massive religious revival. Britain, North America, France and Africa, among others, are seeing unprecedented numbers of people return to Faith.

Why?

It seems this Brave New World has not kept the promise it made to us. The consumerism, the technology, the ‘never-get-old’ products, the drugs, just don’t deliver the joy, the peace and transcendence that we’ve actually been looking for.

And a note on New Age endeavours. As someone who swam in these waters for decades, I can tell you that this too, did not keep its promise. There seems to be a central problem with this model.

It is the unbearable burden of self-invention.

We are not self-authored. Spiritual doctrine would argue with this but this is an inarguable fact. Not only do we not self-author ourselves, but we do not even beat our own hearts. We do not initiate cell apoptosis, nor do we direct neural firing.

We do none of this.

It is simply done.

Something Intelligent moves through all things. It holds the galaxies in perfect alignment, shifts the seasons with an effortless choreographed dance and it moves through your Life like the conductor of a flawless orchestra.

So to think that we could possibly bear the burden of carrying all of the aspects of our lives is both totally overwhelming and unachievable.

And even if we could - and most in the New Age arena believe this wholeheartedly - there is something, Someone, who can do this so much better.

The biggest relief in the world is the realization that we cannot heal ourselves; that it is not possible.

Where would we possibly even start? There are so many interconnected and moving parts to our lives that it would be impossible to know where to go first. Perhaps your trauma is generational. In fact, I would assert that it is. So where would you start?

Two generations back? Fourteen generations back? And then what? What happens then?

Surrendering your Life to God requires great bravery. It asks us to return to the Author of it all and to let go.

And since so much of our dysregulation comes from an imbalanced nervous system, this letting go is the very best news.

A nervous system requires ONE thing for regulation.

Safety.

The harder we dig in our heels and decide that it’s ALL in our hands; our self-invention, our self-healing, our self-directing, our self-governing…the more frayed our nervous system gets.

It knows…it knows Who is at the helm.

Despite a doctrine that tells us over and over again that we don’t need anything outside of ourselves, our bodies know.

It is in the near constant search for something Sacred.

And we’ll try anything but God to get there. Psychedelics, alcohol, bigger houses, faster cars, more sex, more money, more control…but if we were to tell ourselves the truth, it would reveal that none of these things have delivered us.

In my lifetime, I have never felt the presence of God more than now.

Something is happening as we seem to have peaked in our own narcissism; our own seclusion.

The experiment has not worked and the Machine has not delivered the goods.

If you’ve heard the knocking on the inner door of your life…even a subtle knock…be brave enough to answer the door.

While we are swimming in Holy waters in this Christmas season, dare to open a different door.

Your heart will not be satisfied with anything less.