This article is an illustration of something I've long talked about on this blog: how grateful I am for the Great Church Year, and all its seasons and events - and especially for (dare I say it) the particular emotional experiences that attach to them. The Incarnation mirrors human life and how we experience it, in all its breadth and depth - and this is one way it heals on a very deep level. The God who created the stars in heaven has given up power and dominion to put on human flesh and live life as we do, from the highest heights to the lowest depths. God has said, by this means: "See? I know what it is to live a human life, too. This, too, I understand - and all this I have redeemed." (As the Roman playwright Terence put it: "I am human; nothing human is alien to me." In Christianity, this is God speaking!)
What's being argued below is that "secular religion" can't provide anything except a kind of sunny - and false - optimism about the world and about humanity. It cannot speak to our hearts, because it doesn't mirror our own lives at all. But Christianity recognizes, and commemorates (in the "do this in remembrance of me" context), life on earth in all its triumphs - and in all its disasters (and a million shades and colors of every other kind of experience). This is why it's given birth to all that music and art and literature - and all that theology centered in "Incarnation" and the redemption of the human being by means of Incarnation.
What we're seeing below is a rather heartbreaking cry of pain, in fact; he's saying that people have no way of dealing with their own internal emotional lives anymore - with their own heartbreak and sorrows (and joys). And that's a true tragedy - there couldn't be anything worse, IMO. And if true, addressing this is what our vocation going forward must consist of.
Imagine No Religion: Wait. Scratch That. Imagine a Secular Religion
This just in: Swiss writer/thinker Alain de Botton has begun publicizing his forthcoming book Religion for Atheists, in which he revisits the French Revolution attempt to create a ‘secular religion.’ Meaning, he rejects the new atheist tendency to dismiss religion altogether, instead choosing to highlight a few factors that might be worth preserving, post-God. As he points out in an article for Forbes, he’s not the first to hazard the idea – it’s been a humanist hobby ever since there were humanists (or professional athletes) – but what is relatively distinctive are the religious elements he wishes to cherry-pick. That is, de Botton’s not primarily looking to ‘religion’ for insights about charity or ‘random acts of kindness’. Instead, he advocates for the peculiar ability of religion to put man into proper perspective and counter-act our predisposition toward hubris, in the process shedding more than a little light on the vacuousness of much of what passes of the ‘secular’ mindset when it comes to the human condition and human enterprise. In other words, a little pessimism might do us all a little good, and even allow for a bit of much-needed compassion re: misfortune… Of course, while he may be on to something, de Botton’s project is ultimately a silly one; religious ideas will always make a poor substitute for a living God. Call me pessimistic, but one can’t help but notice how the scaffolding, no matter how exquisite, always falls down when it becomes the focus, that is, when there’s nothing there to hold it up, ht SY:
We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of our veneration than our brilliant and morally-troubling fellow human beings.A secular religion would hence begin by putting man into context and would do so through works of art, landscape gardening and architecture. Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us.
A third aspect of secular religion would be to offer us lessons in pessimism. The religion would try to counter the optimistic tenor of modern society and return us to the great pessimistic undercurrents found in traditional faiths. It would teach us to see the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous secular assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfillment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and incompleteness in the human lot, our modern secular ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, condemning us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution. A secular religion would build temples and anoint feast days to disappointment.
A secular religion would deeply challenge liberal ideology. Most contemporary governments and even private bodies are devoted to a liberal conception of help, they have no ‘content’, they want to help people to stay alive and yet they make no suggestions about what these people might do with their lives. This is the opposite of what religions have traditionally done, which is to teach people about how to live, about good (or not so good) ways of imagining the human condition and about what to strive for and to esteem. Modern charities and governments seek to provide opportunities but are not very thoughtful about, or excited by what people might do with those opportunities.
There is a long philosophical and cultural history which explains why we’ve reached the condition known as modern secular society. Yet it seems there’s no compelling argument to stay here.
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