Tag: modernism

THE DISASTER OF MODERNITY

The disaster of modernity:

since the Enlightenment, the intellectuals

in trying to grow beyond the mythic stage to the rational stage

killed the mythic God in the “death of God” movement

but in doing so they truncated their own spiritual growth

they did not go on to higher understandings of God

they repressed their own spiritual intelligence –

and the West has never recovered

 

modernism emphasized the intellectual and technological

and labeled our ancient/natural subjectivity as “superstition”

and this created a disconnect

between heartless individuals

and heartless institutions

 

and this created atheism – some atheists

have no religious awareness/strivings in them

have lauded/applauded humans so much they forgot God

have such a distorted view of God

they do not reject the God of the gospels

who they do not know

but rather they reject a caricature of God

who they have imagined

 

our western preoccupation with practicality

and means not ends

resulted in a total loss of values

and seeing life as a whole

so we became prisoners of urgency/

short-term consequences/

erratic/meaningless lives

 

non-dual thinking is the answer

non-dual thinking is both/and thinking

never either/or thinking –

it includes and honors all the previous stages

 

spirituality that ignores psychological dynamics

and psychology that ignores our spiritual nature

cannot be an adequate guide for people

who want to integrate

the quest for holiness

and the desire for wholeness.

ARMCHAIR CATHOLICISM

As churches institutionalized, they professionalized

and a professional elite took over, the clergy

who focused on how to live the Christian life but lost the why –

the motivations of regular lay believers

 

Catholic clergy have been wrestling with laity forever:

when Catholicism fought the heretical monster

it labeled “modernism”

it condemned modernism’s chief architects:

Galileo/Darwin/Marx/Freud

all Christian and Jewish-atheist laymen

who threatened the church’s

classicism/Hellenism/Thomism

 

however, Bernard Lonergan’s “transcendental precepts”

that underlie his General Epistemological Method (G.E.M.)

that underlies all the hard and soft sciences:

attentiveness (paying attention)/intelligence (what seems to be happening?)/

reasonableness (is that accurate?)/responsibility (what should be done?)

gave Catholicism a new way of doing theology

that matched our fast-emerging world civilization

 

hopefully Lonergan’s work will not be subverted

because assertion and then subversion

of the good/true/beautiful

is the basic pattern of the Bible –

the nonviolent resistance of Jesus to the “normal” state

of his society – the violent Roman Empire –

is met with his murder

 

when individualism reigns in our society

Christian charity alleviates the suffering of individuals

but ignores the unjust structures/laws

made by the privileged to protect the privileged

that cause the suffering in the first place

 

“A Merchant Mentality destroys compassion and the soul –

and the sin behind all sin is dualism – splitting things apart”

– Matthew Fox

 

rather than meditating on God from our armchair

it would be more fruitful to actually unite

with “others” who are least like us

and find Jesus the Christ in them too.