The Crucible

A crucible refers to the medieval practice of melting medals in a pot. It is the transformation of one state to another.

Our world has seen more than its fair share of transformative moments.

The Apostolic Age: This is 1st Century Christianity. The time in which Jesus came to minister and establish the Church.

The Renaissance: An era from the 14th to the 16th centuries marked by leaps in advancements in art, literature and science.

The Age of Enlightenment: Beginning in the 17th century, there was a turning of the tide from faith to reason.

And we are now living in The Technological Age. Where advancements in technology have dramatically changed the way humans work, live and relate.

Our hyper-connectivity in an algorithmic landscape that selects for the most outrageous, extreme and negative bits of information has radically changed the way we exist.

It has done a great job of delivering us into a matrix in which politics is ever present, fear is omnipotent and a sense of ‘not enough’ propels the engine of our lives.

But what if there was a whole other reality awaiting our attention?

Now, in order to get there, we would have to leave our current and dominant techno-reality. We would have to bid it adieu. It feels as if this would take super-human strength.

What if we missed something really, really important? What if we found ourselves irrelevant? Ignorant? Unrelatable?

What if we were meant to?

My walk into Catholicism has ushered in a sort of supernatural and displaced reality. After all, the church says and believes things that are deeply unpopular, or at the very least, politically incorrect.

In response, its critics (both inside and outside the church) call it crazy, outdated, old fashioned and unpopular. But that is assuming that modernity has indeed delivered us somewhere better.

“Things” seems to have taken precedence over relationships. “Identity,” as a singular being, seems to have become more important than the connectivity between beings that bind us together in something beyond ourselves.

The Self has become God.

What was promised a Utopia through technology and modernity has turned into some odd version of Dante’s hell: Individuals frozen in their own individuality, flapping their wings, desperately trying to assert themselves as stand-alone beings.

And yet…that’s not the whole story here.

There is a turning of the tide in one area that has always ushered in a collective crucible.

It is The Relational.

The turning back around towards the Source of all things; the Engine of this Universe.

God.

It is taking the futility and the anguish of the widespread narcissism of modernity and turning it inside out. It is going up and out from the individual and stepping into the relational.

It is rewriting (or at least revisiting) what it means to be truly FREE and ALIVE.

Think about when inspiration has truly come to you; when something walked through the door of your psyche and invited you to step into to something transformative. What was your response to that?

You moved in haste. The engine of your being revved to life and you MOVED, with a kind of fire in your belly.

But there are crucial ingredients that are required for us to move in haste.

Firstly, we have to step out of our own isolation as an individual and place ourselves within a story that is bigger than us. Inspiration does this to us. It expands us. It puts us into a new narrative or perhaps an ancient myth.

And that is how a meaningful life unfolds; within a story.

Okay then.

Once we’re inside of this new story we find certain parameters. These parameters are necessary for the story - the inspiration - to begin to take shape.

Like the banks or boundaries of a river allow the river to move quickly…fiercely, we too, require banks; parameters. These banks pull us up and out of our individual identity; the Self that we all fight so hard to assert and stand apart in this modern landscape.

To be placed in a story bigger than you, you must be willing to leave yourself behind.

This looks like the opposite of individual freedom, doesn’t it? This looks like the opposite of ‘my way.’

In fact, this kind of movement requires that the individual sacrifice himself to something greater than him.

It is here and only here that we take a leap of faith. We remove ourselves from this progressive dystopia. The scrolling, the platforming, the self-identity bullshit, the politics, the culture wars, the noise and the near constant distraction.

It is the dismantling of our own Avatar.

We thirst for a time when meaning and purpose placed us into a crucible that delivered us from the mundane into the profound. A profound that was never to be found in a world run on technological advancement and divorced of its luminous roots.

This crucible has never been a comfortable space. It is the pot where the old is melted to make new metal. We’re not able to cling to hard-won identities in this place. There is no room for narcissism.

Uncertainty abounds here.

But man, do we feel alive in this crucible!

Sebastian Junger wrote a fascinating book called, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. The book discusses the reintegration of soldiers into society and their difficulty in coming to terms with coming home. He illustrates that adversity and danger, in a tribal or communal setting, actually seems to contribute to greater happiness and meaning.

He writes, “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.”

We are built for sacrifice. More specifically, we are built for sacrifice to a greater good.

The luminous invites us in via an initiation, of sorts.

It will ask us to discard anything that holds us to a compromised version of ourselves.

What are your habits? Do they serve something greater than you? Or do they serve the lower parts of yourself?

Where does your attention go on a daily basis? Does it go to the transcendent, to the purposeful, the unconditional? Or is it occupied by the algorithms, the politics, the noise, the stuff of the ego, your endless clingings?

What needs to be sacrificed for you to step into the luminous?

The luminous is not of this world. It lives in it, yes. But it is not of it.

Where have I heard this before?

A couple of years ago, I told God that I was ready. Ready for what, I wasn’t sure.

I just knew, with total certainty, that I was ready.

I took a leap of faith without having any idea where it would deliver me.

It has taken me out of an old, comfortable place and placed me in a crucible. The latin root of crucible is the word crux, meaning cross.

The cross is where we go to die, only to be reborn.

We don’t know how that will look on the other side. But we know we can’t bring our old self with us.

It is a leap of faith that something bigger than us knows what its doing.

And it will always be worth the risk.