The Union of Sacred and Secular

[Molly Brogan]

Sacred and secular…can they co-exist and where do they meet? As we increase our material wealth and extend ourselves with technology, do we have a tendency to lose our sense of what is sacred in the world?

Some say that sacred, or holy, practices are a product of the past that will be outgrown in modern society, and see sacred associated with religion, whose role in the world is currently changing.

Secular is usually associated with bureaucratization, rationalization, urbanization, industrialization, and seen in terms of historical revolutions.

Most of us live with a tension between the two, as sort of being “in the world, but not of the world.” Is it possible to live in integration of the two, with no separation between the sacred and the secular?

American Sociologist C. Wright Mills summarized this process: “Once the world was filled with the sacred – in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.”

In the bible, Paul writes, “To the pure, all things are pure” (Titus 1:15) Finding the sacred in the secular might just be the way to go. But it is not easy to do as we watch the evening news.

What do YOU think?

[Thomas Knierim]

It is important to realise that sacred and secular are both somewhat contrived concepts that result from certain idea systems. The sacred is connected to religious idea systems and the secular is connected to worldly idea systems. Secularity implies the division of worldly and religious affairs.

I am not sure if this is entirely transparent, but the real problem is not the division between religious and worldly affairs, but the division between the religious and the spiritual. It is OK to divorce religion from politics, administration and economy, but it is disastrous to divorce the spiritual from these domains, and we can see the consequences quite clearly at this point in history.

If we could somehow raise the consciousness of mankind in one fell swoop from the religious to the spiritual level, the problem of this dichotomy would disappear.

Cheers, Thomas

[MRJ]

Sacred and secular…can they co-exist and where do they meet? As we increase our material wealth and extend ourselves with technology, do we have a tendency to lose our sense of what is sacred in the world?

Some say that sacred, or holy, practices are a product of the past that will be outgrown in modern society, and see sacred associated with religion, whose role in the world is currently changing.

Secular is usually associated with bureaucratization, rationalization, urbanization, industrialization, and seen in terms of historical revolutions.

Most of us live with a tension between the two, as sort of being “in the world, but not of the world.” Is it possible to live in integration of the two, with no separation between the sacred and the secular?

American Sociologist C. Wright Mills summarized this process: “Once the world was filled with the sacred – in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.”

In the bible, Paul writes, “To the pure, all things are pure” (Titus 1:15) Finding the sacred in the secular might just be the way to go. But it is not easy to do as we watch the evening news.

What do YOU think?

Harvey Cox wrote THE SECULAR CITY back in 1963, maybe 1964. In it he wrestled with the issue, "How does the church exist in the modern, secular city?" "What is sacred?" and so on. He wasn't calling for a "reenchantment" of the secular world - enchantment is over. The task of the church is to learn how to talk to a world that doesn't speak the "old time religion" language. His book influenced me in subtle ways over the years.

I haven't read Cox's book for quite a few years, though I still have the 1964 paperback on my bookshelf, and I did read it again in the early 1980s. It does seem a bit dated, times have changed. Maybe more to the point, the style of the day has changed several times over and one has to adjust some of Cox's flourishes a bit.

I do not now yearn for the sacred, at least in the terms in which I used to look for it. I am happier with the secular now. But the sacred has not disappeared.

I find myself, now in my sixties, less sympathetic with "spirituality" than I have been. So much of what people claim to be their "spirituality" just seems like garbled pop religion, pop psychology, and the like, very poorly integrated into any kind of cohesive system. People engage in these half baked (or just totally uncooked) just-made up rituals, then complain about the traditional rituals of the church (as if there wasn't a strong semblance." So often, especially among corrosive atheists, a religious straw man is made up out of really uninformed views of (usually Christian) theology, and then they pat themselves on the back for the wonderful job they did of just tearing theology to shreds.

Honestly, I don't care if people are atheist, but for god's sake (odd phrase here) at least attack the actual beliefs and theology of the church, rather than your stupid misapprehension of what it is all about!!!

Perhaps Christianity seemed like a garbled mess to the Jewish Establishment of the first century. We don't know for sure what all the Christians were saying and doing at the time. Maybe it was similar to what is going on now in religion - people making up new rituals, new beliefs (sort of) as they go along.

When I try to think of a valid form of spirtuality existing in a very secular world, the person that comes to mind is Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. Or maybe the Delai Lama, outcast from his spiritual home, a pastor to the Tibetan diaspora, yet up to date and smart.

I find traditional religious people, institutions, and texts to be the deepest wells, but I none-the-less find myself extremely conflicted when I interact with these traditions. (I don't feel conflicted when I interact with new age stuff - I just feel repelled.)

In a nutshell, I don't really have any idea how my religious story is going to play out - in the relatively small number of years it has left.