This post at The New Inquiry got me thinking about our current condition as people poised on the brink of the cultural rejection of much of our inherited tradition of religious belief. This is not to say that "religion" is going to disappear; rather, I believe that America, like western Europe, is poised to become yet another culturally secular place, where the vocabulary of faith is as unintelligible to the vast majority as Urdu. We are already at a loss to explain why religion is important in our public life, repeating platitudes and cliches that bear no resemblance to the complex interplay of personal and collective belief and their existential import.
One way of navigating this particular thorny path might well be, as pointed out in the post, not so much reconciling the irreconcilable, but simply setting aside any desire for coherence, yet refusing the grant "irreconcilability" any intellectual or existential traction. One of the problems we moderns have with religious belief is the notion, repeated ad nauseum, that the choices between belief and non-belief offer us stark contrasts. Yet, if one is willing enough to enter in to the life of faith, to surrender oneself to the demands that belief in God place upon us as individuals and collective members of the Church, it becomes clear all too soon, that these are actually false choices. Facing the incoherence of the world around us, we are called as believers to love it in all its horror and sublime beauty precisely because our God has also loved it enough to sacrifice the glory of deity in order that the world may yet become what it was created to be.
In other words, really seeing the world as a believer, one affirms the essential nihilism that surrounds us all as the way of the world. It becomes the task of the believer to affirm the essential goodness of this sad panoply of madness and joy, sorrow and ecstasy, and to live within it as deeply, as consciously, as possible, without ever allowing it to define our own existence. The lack of coherence that is the source of so much of our contemporary malaise, of which our contemporary loss of understanding of the vocabulary of faith is a presentiment, is a stage that is necessary for the believer. We stand upon the one rock, to quote Jesus, that does not fail, as the floods wash away all the rest around us. It is not up to us to be the rock; it is only our part to declare this rock's existence, and to offer a hand up out of the maelstrom. While not washed away by it, we are as much victims precisely because every body that washes by (to continue the metaphor a bit) cries out to our heart. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, save them all, but should at least rejoice at each instance of this or that individual grasping our hand and being pulled to (relative) safety.
Right now, our society is in the midst of the storm at its fiercest. The churches in their varieties are losing the ability to speak to those around us, to call out so others can understand us, and get a helping hand up. We have allowed a combination of ignorance and sloppy-thinking to become our lingua franca, with the fake notions of left/right, liberal/conservative become our dominant modes of thought and communication. We accept far to readily the (false) modern idea that there is some kind of separation between the "personal" and the "social"; that "religion" is some kind of "personal" area that has no impact upon our social lives. We are stripping ourselves of the ability to be, as we are called to be, the hands and eyes and heart of the God who is declared to be love for this broken world.
The loss of any intellectual or moral or existential coherence, summed up so well by the appeal to nihilism can be affirmed by the Church and believers. What we need, though, is the renewal, or perhaps invention, of a vocabulary that can speak to this reality without allowing it to overwhelm our ability to communicate an alternative from it.
