I woke up this morning wanting to smell incense, hear organs and listen to the word of God. So I went to an Episcopal Church nearby. I do not attend church on any regular basis. It is something I occasionally feel compelled to do. And on each occasion this year it has been to a different one.
Thinking of myself as a pilgrim has put a completely different angle on these compulsions, because in fact I do seek a non-partisan approach to life's most serious questions. Having completed Peterson's Maps of Meaning, Huxley's Perennial Philosophy and Pollan's How to Change Your Mind this year I am coming to think of Myth and Mysticism more. I have also been reading more recently Gene Wolfe and turning more to the truth of myth and magic. Yesterday as I sat with a small group led by Rabbi Mordecai Finely again the idea of being a Mystic appealed to me.
What compels me at present is recognizing the limits of human perception. I think perhaps that when we don't know, there is a pattern to our guessing whenever we attempt to be logical. However when we attempt to be nihilistic or perverse little of that is sustainable. The truly lunatic end themselves. Society retains, in our material good fortune, greater proportions of those who deviate from the Logos, but this is just a cycle. When stressed, we will return to old ways. Or as a writer said, we will start naming our children with old names hoping they avoid today's madness.
In other words, love and reason are natural. Our sociability based on such is an evolutionary trait we ignore at our peril. We have the capability of self-understanding although it is exceedingly difficult. The path is through study, virtue and discipline with a good respect for chance.
But why is one liturgy different than another? Why is history taught one way in one place and another way elsewhere? What are the principled reasons why monotheisms develop particular disciplines? I think of social energies as thermodynamic. The efforts required to develop a framework of knowledge and to sustain that framework and push creations through it with fidelity are great. The mystic, perhaps, is the most efficient metaphysics. As CS Lewis says, any child can understand magic. Yet the physicist or technologist who makes his craft appear to be sufficiently like magic takes years to explain it even to his peers and apprentices. So whatever survives in our collective consciousness and conventional wisdom is the effort of tremendous parallel, independent processes. These great energies cannot be denied. Great as they are, they only evolve at the pace of social evolution. Exceedingly slowly this is done. The future is unevenly distributed, as is knowledge of ourselves, and our history. And yet human metaphysics remain because we are still yet human. There is always that constraint.
So I take liturgies as containing the essence of metaphysics. I seek to compare them. They are embodiment of a way of knowing, of moral instruction, of ethical discipline. I want to experience their differences and commonalities.
Religion is important in secular societies because they are given for free. And as that which grows more and more expensive and out of the reach of the common man, he will revert. That’s what I see happening to higher education. It is far too expensive to be practical, and its practitioners can barely afford it themselves. Yet all kinds of foolish money goes into it. To what practical end? There is much in the breach between the academy and the education of the common man. I think America will revert, but not to civil religion.
So what will work? I think a large number of things can and will work. We are transitioning to the next common medium that will sustain moral instruction and ethical discipline. I want to understand its metaphysics.
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