Losing the Mystery ...

“Was heute zu retten ist, das ist das Mysterium von Golgotha.” Rudolf Steiner in 1920. Which means again: What is to be saved today, is the Mystery of Golgotha.

So much, I think, can be inferred from this simple statement. Including the fact that Rudolf Steiner was very awake to the forces that would seek to eclipse the Christian Mystery …

Now from the beginning, this weblog has hardly been systematic. It is fragmentary at best. However it is even more fragmentary, than I would like at the moment. And we will soon be pausing for another hiatus mandated by events in my personal life.

But first, I thought I would take a brief dip into autobiography for some things that may serve to illumine these issues – and why I write about them.

I came into contact with the relatively young New Age movement in 1980, age 16. At that point, I visited the Findhorn Community in northern Scotland – which is widely seen as one of the leading New Age centres of Europe, if not the world.

Later, I would live in Findhorn for an extended period, and for many years I drew much inspiration from its work, rooted in noble aspirations and marked, I feel, by a great deal of sincerity and love.

Now in those comparatively early days of the New Age culture, the movement was relatively invisible. For example, one did not generally find New Age literature in a mainstream bookshop.

No, where I lived near London, one had to visit specialist bookshops in the area. Outside the metropolis, I am sure such literature was even harder to find.

However in 2004, I visited the largest bookshop in Europe - Waterstones, Piccadilly in London. There, in this VAST emporium, which cannot in anyway be considered ‘specialist’ or anything less than mainstream, but which presumably represents the concerns of Londoners - I found four **gigantic** bookshelves devoted to Christianity.

Across the same room, however, I found and began to count, one, two, three … 30 **equally gigantic** bookshelves devoted to ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ – the literature of the New Age movement.

Now this is a very personal and approximate image – but it nonetheless suggests a ratio of 30:4 - 30 to 4 in modern Europe seeking spiritual satisfaction through ‘New Age-ism’ as opposed to the Church. (At least modern Protestant Europe. My experience suggests that although Holland and Germany, for example, may be similar to Britain in this regard - the Catholic countries are not so much.)

It also suggests a vast shift has taken place this last quarter of a century.

While those of a Hermetic orientation may note with relief that people at least seek spirituality and mystery beyond the materialism and empiricism which choke our culture, yet it is so often a spirituality in which the Christian Mystery is flattened …

And I find myself wondering what the ratio might be in another quarter of a century? 60 to 4? … 60 to 1??!

I also find myself wondering about the desiccation of the Christian **Mystery**. Which again, it seems to me, is most pronounced in the countries of Protestant heritage.

And I am also wondering how many thousands (millions?) completely **ignore** the Church, as I did, while they search for Mystery ...

Tomorrow, I hope to return to Rudolf Steiner’s notion that not only did the Mystery of Golgotha need to be preserved – but that it was definitely under threat.