Confessions XI (Christian and New Age Responses to Suffering)

Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

Today I will say more of why I now feel the New Age Model is flawed in its ability to respond to the demands of social and environmental justice.

But first, a further word on Catholicism. For again, these are my personal confessions, as I look back on my New Age past, through the lens of my Catholic Christian experience.

Now, this experience included a growing astonishment - an astonishment as to how very, very rich the Catholic tradition truly was.

I, who all my New Age life, had simply assumed it was anachronistic and largely irrelevant to the future. O monstrous presumption! The barefaced arrogance of youth to dismiss an immense tradition - of which I was almost entirely ignorant.

But enough of personal regret. What I would focus on now, is that among many other aspects of the Catholic tradition, I was slowly amazed to discover its extensive **engagement** with the suffering and social conditions of the modern world.

Now this happens **practically** through countless Catholic initiatives to render aid throughout the globe. But there is also a highly developed **theoretical** work proceeding apace – which is popularly called Catholic Social Teaching.

Yes, while the media would focus us on little else but Catholic positions on gender and sexuality, the Catholic Church has been quietly amassing reams of acute, penetrating social analysis -including papal, episcopal and conciliar thinking -most of which is very challenging to the kind of corporate libertarianism now devastating the world.

Though this is not the place to detail it, I simply wish to offer my view, that here is a formidable and penetrating teaching, relating to the abuses of capitalism and consumerism and oriented towards more humane systems of society.

And for me, it is a vastly more convincing effort than anything I encountered through the New Age. Yes here and there, I found New Agers with critiques of social injustice – which were sometimes moving and acute.

And many in the New Age movement also have a developed environmental awareness – at least at a level of individual or local action. Findhorn where I lived, is building an inspiring eco-village, for example. Yes when I look at Findhorn, with its wind-energy, its living sewage system (sewage purified by living organisms, not chemicals) eco-buildings and so forth – I must deeply honour its Green commitment and awareness.

Yet for a sustained critical analysis as to the causes and many of the costs of capitalist globalisation, I confess I find much more hope in Catholic Social Teaching. As also direct Catholic social action inspires me with hope.

And by contrast, it seems to me that so much of the New Age movement is all-too-accommodating to commercialist capitalism.

And I confess that I see a link between this frequent myopia to social injustice and the New Age Stripping of Tradition.

As I have said, I am concerned the New Age Stripping of Tradition can lead to losing a sense of the Fall, of Tragedy, of Evil.

But it may be that it is **precisely** these qualities which are NEEDED to awaken the heart to social justice. And which strengthen our **resolve** to address the suffering of the world.

Yes, for this reason, the traditional teaching of the Church may be more necessary than ever … to address the suffering of the world.

For as I shall come to express more fully, I am disturbed by another feature of New Age thought, which I experienced in many forms over the years.

It involves a denial of suffering. It is a denial in the affirmation that either suffering is illusory or it is unimportant, compared to a transcendent light and joy at the heart of the universe.

Now I do not deny that what is ultimately most real is God and God is love. And to love involves the profoundest of joys. But to love is also to feel the depth of compassion and to suffer in that compassion.

Thus the God of the Christian Tradition embodies profound opposites – the most Unfathomable Joy of Love and the most Unfathomable Suffering of Love. The God I believe in, is not remote, but is suffering with us.

But this God is lost in so, so much New Age teaching ...

More will be said. For now, I simply emphasise that a spirituality of excessive optimism can shade into denial. And a soul in denial is not equipped to bear or address suffering. On the contrary, this soul must inevitably become **weakened **.

Thus, when I look out on the challenges of the New Millennium, I see a need for spirituality which **strengthens** us. Yet this it seems to me, is not a spirituality of excess light, but rather one that also confronts the fact that we are fallen. We are broken and weak. The condition of the planet testifies all too painfully to our brokenness and our weakness ...

But we are not alone and and we are not unaided. And thus I also see a need for a spirituality, which acknowledges that Supernatural Grace is there to help us. There is the Grace of Christ. There is the Grace flowing through the Angelic Hierarchies and through the Communion of Saints. And there is the Grace flowing through the Sacraments …