Simply Christian

Many people today hear the very word "spirituality" like travelers in a desert hearing news of an oasis. This isn't surprising. The skepticism that we've been taught for the last two hundred years has paved our world with concrete, making people ashamed to admit that they have had profound and powerful "religious" experiences. Where before they would have gone to church, said their prayers, worshipped in this way or that, and understood what they were doing as part of the warp and woof of the rest of life, the mood of the Western world from roughly the 1780s through to the 1980s was very different. We will pipe you (said the prevailing philosophy) the water you need; we will arrange for "religion" to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever. Those who want it can have enough to keep them going. Those who don't want their life, and their way of life, disrupted by anything "religious" can enjoy driving along concrete roads, visiting concrete-based shopping malls, living in concrete-floored houses. Live as if the rumor of god had never existed! We are, after all, in charge of our own fate! We are the captains of our own souls (whatever they may be)! That is the philosophy which has dominated our culture. From this point of view, spirituality is a private hobby, an up-market version of daydreaming for those who like that kind of thing.