Crisis of Faith

I strive to find beauty in the merest semblences of love, for it seems to me that nearly all of us are presently incapable of feeling, giving, and receiving real love.

In the shivering isolation of our increasingly materialistic and industrialized societies, we have lost the capacity to love, to suffer, to see. We have lost our humanity. As one means of survival, we have learned to laugh at the vacuity and absurdity of modern life. Now this humor, this giddy, ironic distantiation, is all we know. We forget the horror it exists to cover up. We forget that the truly human response to horror is not good humor but heroic compassion.

Our time is frittered away on the most trivial things, and when we do make some noble effort to be serious, to reflect meaningfully on our lives and the greater life of humanity, we find this sobriety and depth quite beyond our abilities; often, we turn even our 'superficial depth' into another occasion for self-satisfaction. Our best efforts at generating spirituality ring painfully hollow.

What an uttery mockery our worship has become! We turn away from God, who is within, in order to praise him outwardly. Truly, it is not God whom we praise thusly, but a false spectre, made in the image of man to flatter man.

Rather than confront the reality of our condition, and begin where we are, we seek instead to pacify ourselves and others with the assertion that there is, at least, a better, more authentic life somewhere; that there is another reality, far more real than this one, and, if we cannot see it, we yet have some faith that it exists, -- and this is, for us, still another cause of self-congratulation.

Of course, we are all so easily daunted by the path which seems to lead from here to there, and have little or no hope that such vision is possible for ourselves. That it is, or ever was, possible to order our lives in harmony with the divine will now appears as some kind of sick dream.

We seem to believe that madness is our proper home and, indeed, it has taken on a rather domestic feel; almost cheerfully, we shut ourselves in, stoke the fire of materialism, make the bed of indifference, and so on.

How shall we extricate ourselves and our neighbors from this nightmare? How shall we recover the fortitude to even look at it squarely, let alone the faith to look and hope for something beyond it?