Sacred & Secular.

This graphic is only marginally related to the posting, but I like the design. That's me.

All religion is concerned in varying degrees with metaphysical ideas, moral norms and mystical experience. But in the great religions, the moral and the mystical have often been in tension. The more a religion stresses ecstasy, the less it seems hidebound by rules—especially rules of public behaviour, as opposed to purely religious norms. And religious movements (from the “Deuteronomists” of ancient Israel to the English Puritans) that emphasise moral norms tend to eschew the ecstatic.

Max Weber, one of the fathers of religious sociology, contrasted the transcendental feelings enjoyed by Catholic mass-goers with the Protestant obsession with behaviour. In Imperial Russia, Peter the Great tried to pull the Russian Orthodox church from the former extreme to the latter: to curb its love of rite and mystery and make it more of a moral agency like the Lutheran churches of northern Europe. He failed. Russians liked things mystical, and they didn’t like being told what to do.

So describes an unnamed writer in the Economist Magazine reviewing The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures, by Nicolas Wade.

I come to this now as a discussion group in our little community church explores the ideas in The Invisible Church, by Pittman McGehee and Damon Thomas. For me, the context in our gentle mountain hamlet is the number of people I know--my friends--who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. And express their views in overwhelming numbers by staying away from church services by droves.

I think mountain folk are like Russians. They like things mystical, and they don't like being told what to do.

At a more personal level, I find myself in an extended cycle of hunger for the ascendant, in a world and a life that is more and more sharply defined as mundane. Or should I say, dully defined.

I believe McGehee is issuing an invitation here to taste the ascendant. Our conversation about the book--and the book itself--wants to focus on matters of theological difference, calmly described with deferential courtesy to contrary points of view. Very Presbyterian, to no one's surprise. In my bones I know the question is not one of theology or logic or reason.

It's a question as deep as the human soul, as old as the human race, as wide as the distance between heaven and earth.