What happens …
When life's most profound and important matters … matters we variously name as beauty, morality, love, mystery and the Sacred …
Are no longer treated as such by the culture around us? Because they cannot be *empirically proven* and established as having anything beyond relative, subjective or private value?
What happens …
When, because of this, from the moment of our first breath, we are born into a world that only admits as uncontestably true, that which functions, that which has utilitarian value, that which submits to statistics and the ‘bottom line’?
What happens ...
When, because of this, we live In a world, where the most toxic substances are ‘innocent till proven guilty’. Such that it took decades before we had amassed sufficient evidence to *empirically prove* that nicotine was dangerous. And we began to take countermeasures? To say nothing of countless other toxins – physical, psychological and spiritual – for which little or no *empirical proof* will ever come?
What happens …
When, because of this, we live In a world where children are bombarded from their earliest days by ‘harmless advertising’, though manufactured for the specific intent of turning people into mechanical, Pavlovian automatons? And few raise any word in protest, because after all, you can’t *empirically prove* that such brainwashing is harmful to the human spirit?
What happens …
When we human beings are profoundly effected, not only by what we consciously assimilate, but what we unconsciously absorb? And the culture proclaims the triumph of the utilitarian over beauty, depth and Mystery in a myriad of ways?
To take a single example, even the architecture the modern American child will absorb from her earliest days, proclaims the utilitarian, the functional, the uniform and monotonous. The rooms of the baby’s house will be formed by rigid, lifeless, 90 degree angles, as will all the surrounding streets and buildings …
What happens …
When so much, so very, very, very much of all we absorb throughout our lives is predicated (consciously or not) on functionality, epistemological uncertainty, and a concomitant vacuum that allows rapacious mercantilists – and I don’t mean simply the nicotine merchants – to conquer our minds and hearts, and the minds and hearts of our children?
What happens …
That is, when so very, very, very much of the culture we absorb is not SACRAMENTAL?
These are questions that arise in the mind of this Hermetic Catholic.
They are questions that will be daily explored throughout this blog.
2 comments:
Thank you for this, head. It's just nice to know someone is out there. And who cares about these things. I may have confused with someone else - please forgive me if I do - but you don't cruise in a black submarine, do you? With real heart, I might add.
Roger, I doubt you ever check this blog any more, but reading the first entry on Cor Jesu led me here and I find it fasincating.
I am looking forward to reading some more of your writings in chronological order to see the development in them.
MaterLaeta
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