Therefore, our many studies of world cultures are soulless,
replacing the common bonding of humanity and its shared wisdom with bytes
of information that have no way of getting into us deeply, of nourishing
and transforming our sense of ourselves. Soul has been extracted from the
beginning, because we conceive education to be about skills and
information, not about depth of feeling and imagination.
Everyday Sacredness
Another aspect of modern life is a loss of formal religious
practice in many people's lives, which is not only a threat to
spirituality as such, but also deprives the soul of valuable symbolic and
reflective experience. Care of the soul might include a recovery of
formal religion in a way that is both intellectually and emotionally
satisfying. One obvious source of spiritual renewal is the religious
tradition in which we were brought up.
Some people are fortunate in that their childhood tradition is
still relevant and lively to them, but others feel detached from their
religion because it was a painful experience for them, or because it
seems just too naive and simple-minded. Yet the fundamental insights of
every tradition are ever subjected to fresh imagination in a series of
reformations, and what might otherwise be a dead tradition becomes the
base of a continually renewing spiritual sensibility.
There are two ways of thinking about church and religion. One is
that we go to church in order to be in the presence of the holy, to learn
and to have our lives influenced by that presence. The other is that
church teaches us directly and symbolically to see the sacred dimension
of everyday life. In this latter sense, religion is an "art of memory," a
way of sustaining mindfulness about the religion that is inherent in
everything we do. For some, religion is a Sunday affair, and they risk
dividing life into the holy Sabbath and the secular week. For others,
religion is a week-long observance that is inspired and sustained on the
Sabbath. For them, it is not insignificant that in our language each day
of the week is dedicated to a god or goddess, from Saturn's Saturday to
Thursday's Thor to Monday's Moon.
Yet how can we catch the appearance of the sacred in the most
ordinary objects and circumstances? For one thing, we can all create
sacred books and boxes-a volume of dreams, a heartfelt diary, a notebook
of thoughts-and thus in a small but significant way can make the everyday
sacred. This kind of spirituality, so ordinary and close to home, is
especially nourishing to the soul. Without this lowly incorporation of
the sacred into life, religion can become so far removed from the human
situation as to be irrelevant. People can be extremely religious in a
formal way and yet profess values in everyday life that are thoroughly
secular.
An appreciation for vernacular spirituality is important because,
without it, our idealization of the holy-making it precious and too
removed from life-can actually obstruct a genuine sensitivity to what is
sacred. Church-going can become a mere aesthetic experience or,
psychologically, even a defense against the power of the holy. Formal
religion, so powerful and influential in the establishment of values and
principles, always lies on a cusp between the divine and the demonic.
Religion is never neutral. It justifies and inflames the emotions of a
holy war, and it fosters profound guilt about love and sex. The Latin
word sacer, the root of sacred, means both "holy" and "taboo," so dose is
the relationship between the holy and the forbidden.
Spirituality is seeded, germinates, sprouts, and blossoms in the
mundane. It is to be found and nurtured in the smallest of daily
activities. The spirituality that feeds the soul and ultimately heals our
psychological wounds may be found in those sacred objects that dress
themselves in the accoutrements of the ordinary.
Maintenance of the Holy
While mythology is a way of telling stories about felt experience
that are not literal, ritual is an action that speaks to the mind and
heart but doesn't necessarily make sense in a literal context. In church,
people do not eat bread in order to feed their bodies but to nourish
their souls.
If we could grasp this simple idea, that some actions may not have
an effect on actual life but speak instead to the soul, and if we could
let go of the dominant role of function in so many things we do, then we
might give more to the soul every day. A piece of clothing may be useful,
but it may also have special meaning in relation to a theme of the soul.
It is worth going to a little trouble to make a dinner a ritual by
attending to the symbolic suggestiveness of the food and the way it is
presented and eaten. Without this added dimension, which requires some
thought, it may seem that life goes on smoothly. But slowly the soul is
weakened and can make its presence known only in symptoms.
It's worth noting that neurosis, and certainly psychosis, often
takes the form of compulsive ritual. Yet when we can't stop ourselves
from eating certain foods or pull ourselves away from the television set,
isn't this also a compulsive ritual? Could it be that these neurotic
rituals appear when imagination has been lost and the soul is no longer
cared for? In other words, neurotic rituals could signify a loss of
ritual in daily life that, if present, would keep the soul in imagination
and away from literalism.
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