My Fellow Americans …

I want to strike a more personal note today. My reasons involve the diversity of feedback I receive. Everything it seems from a wish at one extreme, that I give this webblog more intellectual beef, and less ‘rhetorical’ flab, to a suggestion at the other extreme, that I make it more accessible.

All of this leads me to conclude there is space here for a variety of approaches. Here comes a different, more personal one to the same issues …

I am an American living in Ireland. Since I last left America nearly twenty years ago, I have visited my home country only once. It was in many ways a chilling experience. I walked around New York – both upstate and the city – and I found myself repeatedly saying to myself: ‘Americans have no idea how poor they are …’

And I didn’t mean simply economic poverty, though that was all around me. I also meant social and cultural poverty. Upstate I had hoped – naively - to find perhaps-mythical beautiful New England-like villages. But I found parking lots and shopping malls instead.

And as I write these words, I recall the little store I had visited throughout my youth in America, a store which, in my memory at least, has **soul**. But which I now know has been demolished to provide parking for a giant chain supermarket. And this is just one example of the kind of horror I felt, as I encountered many other things that troubled me … Including at times, a dull, mechanical response in certain people I met.

Now lest anyone think I am on some pro-Europe, anti-America trip, let me hasten to add that I am addressing here a world-wide process. It is hardly American. In Europe however, there are certain factors that still retard and delay this world-wide process.

Chief among these is that in Europe, one stands far more in the presence of the **past**. A past, which, for all its horrors, still speaks of soul. In the comments to this blog, ‘the Head’ has raised the role of art in saving the soul of the world.

Well, in Europe one is still raised far, far more in a landscape of soulful art. The car parks and shopping malls are coming more and more of course - but one finds many, many streets of buildings, for example, built with **inspiration** – instead of ‘bottom line’ utilitarian efficiency.

Built that is, in an era when the Spirit was taken seriously, and not reduced to subjectivity and relativism. One can easily grow up here surrounded by art and soul. When Catholics go to Mass, they may have to suffer an inane modern liturgy, but even this can be lifted up by the testimony of the permanent 'liturgy' in stone and stained glass …

No I do not think that the answer is to turn medieval once again, or that America should become like Europe. But yes, my return to America not long ago, and the America that now greets me in countless reports, is an America that seems ever more stripped of Soul and Mystery. Ever more two-dimensional ...

And we see the same process across our globe; it is just a little slower in some parts. And the process is NOT decelerating. Rather the reverse. I stare into the future, and I find myself staring into horror. My soul, like yours perhaps, is in pain. Pain, but not despair. Something can and must be done for the Soul of the World …