St. Mary's, Norwalk, Conn.
From St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “And this hope will not leave us disappointed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
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But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when or how or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god: and this has never happened before.
That men both deny gods and worship gods, profession first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
It is this passage from T.S. Eliot’s “Choruses from the Rock” that describes the current situation of man in this present age. And Eliot is correct: this has never happened before. Human history is characterized by the awareness of the sacred, however that awareness has taken form. It has always been a given. But something has happened in this time: men have left God not for other gods but for no god. But, the answer swiftly comes: “All the polls show that the great majority of Americans say that they are religious”. The liberal press is fond of trumpeting the rise of professed atheism, but most people would describe themselves as religious in some way. But because people say that they in some sense believe in God, does not mean that for all practical purposes this belief is not in fact a form of atheism, for if you go on to questions them about this god and their relationship to this god, you discover, and this is true about many religious people who even attend church, that this god is a mental, subjective construct who plays no role in their lives. For this is a god who has to fit into the post- modern way of looking at things. And what is this way of looking at things?
