I fully agree with Dickow\u2019s opening premise: There are millions of so-called Christians who believe they don\u2019t need the Church. God is everywhere, even at the beach. Who needs clergy, buildings, liturgy? In the college-educated, knee-jerk-liberal suburbs north of Boston, I am surrounded by people who think like this. Many of them buy this basic premise of today\u2019s New Age, along with another fundamental tenet: \u201cI create my own reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
But to me, who was a young adult during the tsunami of so-called \u201cspiritual awakening\u201d that characterized the late 1960s, when the parents and grandparents of today\u2019s New Agers were channeling Eastern thought into the western mainstream, what passes for \u201cNew Age\u201d today looks like just another publishing fad, a third-degree undertow of the tsunami, or what the Sufis (popular in the late 1960s) called the soup of the soup of the soup. Personally, I\u2019m going to let it all wash out to sea. The Church will still be standing.<\/p>\n
How do millions of Christians get duped into believing the ramblings of New Age messengers like the best-selling Neale Donald Walsch? The same way they get duped into believing the premise of films like \u201c2012\u201d and listening to artistes<\/i> like Britney Spears. It\u2019s the media, stupid. Ten years from today, guaranteed, <\/i>other gurus, blockbusters, and chanteuses<\/i> will be running up even bigger numbers. The Church will still be standing.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s my perspective. You have to go back to the First World War and the years following. Ha, ha, sorry\u2014I\u2019m not that <\/i>old, but I\u2019ve done my reading. It was after the first war that T. S. Eliot wrote \u201cThe Waste Land,\u201d a description of the spiritual landscape in the 1920s, and Robert Graves wrote \u201cGoodbye to All That,\u201d a sad adieu to all the old certainties. The war\u2019s terrible slaughter had left the West limp with disillusionment, and the old ways, all of them, had been shown to be moribund\u2014apparently. Modernism was the vogue, and other isms like communism, socialism, and existentialism were in the ascendant. Catholicism? Outdated, ossified, impotent, unnecessary.<\/p>\n
One example cited by Dickow, \u201cI create my reality,\u201d is a third-degree simplification of the Gurdjieff teaching that one\u2019s \u201clevel of being\u201d attracts one\u2019s life. The term \u201cI\u201d assumes one level of being; Gurdjieff made no such assumption. In his own allegorical way, he held with the dogma of original sin and the brokenness of our humanity. <\/p>\n It was in the late 1960s that the teachings begotten by Gurdjieff, Suzuki, Krishnamurti, et al., flowered in the hothouse of countercultural rebellion against certainties political as well as spiritual. These teachings went mainstream; when \u201cmy generation\u201d wasn\u2019t sucking on hookahs and listening to \u201cWhite Rabbit,\u201d or striking against the war in Vietnam, we were all agog over the spiritual news from the East.<\/p>\n We got over it. The joke of my generation is that we turned the world upside-down, then most of us went straight. The joke of the next generation, today\u2019s \u201cNew Agers,\u201d is that they thought they discovered what we had already sampled and many of us had abandoned, at least those of us who went to work for Goldman Sachs and had 1.7 children.<\/p>\n Something else happened in the next generation, however, which runs completely counter to the New Age: an evangelical revival of traditional Christianity in the most secular country on earth, the United States. With the remarkable force transmitted by the papacy of John Paul II, backed up by the genial teaching of Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has been revitalized\u2014potentially rediscovering the meaning of Vatican II and magnetizing such unlikely converts as . . . well, me.<\/p>\n So I\u2019m not going to worry too much about the latest pablum being served up by New Agers, no matter how many books they sell. Ages will continue to come and go, but my money says, the Church will still be standing.<\/p>\n I read Cheryl Dickow\u2019s Catholic Exchange article for 11\/23\/09 with interest and a shrug. \u201cNew Age,\u201d the title frets: \u201cStill With Us and Still Dangerous.\u201d Still with us? Sure. Still Dangerous? To me, the New Age, now in reruns, is no more dangerous than, say, \u201c2012\u201d or Britney Spears. You can judge for yourself about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/_dmDaLWNETzg\/SwssbGvVI8I\/AAAAAAAAAh4\/r4a83Pz39oY\/s200\/Gurdjieff\")
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