I Come to the Garden Alone

The following is a excerpt from an article Michael Horton (Putting Amazing back into Grace, The Whitehorse Inn weekly radio show) wrote titled "I Come to the Garden Alone".

Citing examples from TV, pop music, and best-selling books, an article in Entertainment Weekly noted that pop-culture's going gaga for spirituality. However, the writer tells us, "Seekers of the day are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian imagery, Eastern mediation, self-help lingo, a vaguely conservative craving for virtue, and a loopy new-age pursuit of peace. This happy free-for-all appealing to Baptists and star-gazers alike comes off more like Forrest Gump's ubiquitous box of chocolates than like any real system of belief, 'You never know what you're gonna get.'"

The search for the sacred has becoming a recurring cover-story for national news magazines for a lot of time now. Not only historians and sociologists but novelists are writing about the Gnostic character of the "soup" we call Christianity in the United States today. In an article in Harpers, "Hot Air Gods", very recently, in fact, December 2007, Curtis White describes our situation pretty well. "When we assert this is my belief," says White "we're invoking our right to have our own private conviction no matter how ridiculous, not only tolerated politically, but respected by others. It says 'I've invested a lot of emotional energy in this belief and in a way I stake the credibility of my life on it. So If you ridicule it you can expect a fight.' In this kind of culture," says White "Yahweh and Baal, my God and yours, stroll arm-in-arm as if to do so were the model of virtue itself." He goes on to say, "what we require of belief is not that it makes sense, but that it be sincere. This is so even for our more secular convictions. Clearly this is not the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy, but it's sort of a workshop spirituality that you can get with a cereal box-top and five dollars. And yet in our culture to suggest that such belief isn't deserving of respect makes people anxious, an anxiety that expresses itself in a desperate sincerity with which we deliver life's little lessons. There is an obvious problem with this form of spirituality, it takes place in isolation. Each of us sits at our computer terminal tapping out our convictions. Consequently it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy, it is heresy as orthodoxy.

When the political freedom of religion has been broadened to the dogma that everyone is free to believe whatever she likes," says White "there is no real shared conviction at all and hence no church, certainly no community. Strangely our freedom to believe has achieved the condition that Nietzsche called 'nihilism', but by a root he never imagined. While European Nihilists just denied God, American Nihilism is something different. Our Nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It's all good." White poignantly concludes his essay, "we would prefer to be left alone. Warmed by our beliefs that make no sense, whether they are the quotidian platitudes of ordinary Americans, the magical thinking of Evangelicals, the mystical thinking of New-Age Gnostics, the teary-eyed patriotism of Conservatives, or the perfervid loyalty of the rich to their free-market mammon. We are thus the congregation of the church of the infinitely fractured, splendidly alone together. And apparently that 's how we like it. Our pluralism of belief says both to ourselves and to other s 'keep your distance.' And isn't this all strangely familiar? Aren't these all the false gods that Isaiah and Jeremiah confronted - the cults of the 'hot air gods?' The gods that couldn't scare birds from a cucumber patch? Belief of every kind and cult, self-indulgent, and self-aggrandizement of every degree, all flourish here. And yet God is abandoned."

That comes from a non-Christian and the magazine Harpers. So the search for the sacred is really another round of American heresy as orthodoxy. The flight of the lonely Gnostic soul from nowhere to nowhere. We are prisoners of our own subjectivity confined to the lonely cell of our limited experiences expectations, and felt needs.