[W]e’ve lost something. To be honest, we had it taken from us, historically. When the altars were stripped in Britain, that was top-down. The English Reformation was not a move of the common people. It came top-down; it was taken away. And what you see after that, in the whole—and continuing in the whole Anglophone world, what you see is an awareness at some level of what’s been lost; that we’ve been reduced to language, that some element of the noetic side, of the spiritual, has been stripped away, and it comes out in all these weird ways. You have somebody like Sir Isaac Newton getting obsessed with alchemy and finding bizarre symbolism and structures in the book of Revelation.
You have weird folk remedies and cures and what are essentially remnants of paganism and superstition cropping up in Puritan communities in the US who fled to have their totally pure English Calvinist religion, have all of these things going on, and relatively accepted, because they’re just part of life. We are aware, even when we want to deny it, no matter how fiercely we want to deny it; we’re aware that the spiritual is there. We experience it all the time. So it’s going to come out in those unhealthy ways if we don’t come up with a healthy approach.
So Fr. Andrew just talked about the idea that these things have spiritual resonance, all the things we do in our life; I’m going to come at it from the other angle. We tend to try to pursue the spiritual as spiritual; that’s what Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemy is. We want visions, we want experiences, we go out and, because we’ve still got this bifurcation, we realize, “I have all this… I’m a materialist. I have this mindset. I need to get this spiritual back,” and so we start pursuing purely spiritual experience in this sort of purely spiritual way. And there are folks out there who just bounce around from mysticism to mysticism and from meditative practice to meditative practice, trying to chase after that experience. But since the reality is that the spiritual underlies the material, the only way to get to the spiritual is through the material. These always go together.
This is why St. Paul says, “I can have all visions, I can speak in the tongues of men and angels, I can have all gifts and prophesy. I can do all these things, and if I don’t have love, I’m nothing; I’m worthless. I’m garbage; it’s pointless.” Love is the way we approach these things. So if you want to get the spiritual back in your life, and you want to really get it, the real thing, not the counterfeit—you want to get the real deal—then the next time you see—and you won’t have to wait long—the next time you see someone who needs someone to smile at them, smile at them. The next time you see someone who needs someone to talk to them, or, more importantly, listen to them, listen to them. The next time you see someone who needs help, help them. And you’ll be amazed at how, as you start doing those things, the spiritual starts to come alive for you. You start to understand the world more.
You’re not going to go and find the spiritual on its own and add it to the material you already have, but through love you’re going to draw close to God, and your nous will begin to be cleansed. You’ll get your mind right, and you’ll start to see what it is that’s been going on around you this whole time, and you’ll start to understand. And that’s also why St. Paul tells us in Hebrews that faith, which should be translated “faithfulness,” is the substance of things hoped for. When we’re faithful, all of a sudden all of those hopes and dreams, all of these things that we’re just sort of believing by faith or intuition, suddenly have substance, suddenly become real to us.
So that’s my closing thought. There’s a very practical way to try to get back to where ancient people were, and it’s not through estotericism or even mysticism; it’s through loving your neighbor, in very real and very practical ways that every single one of us can start doing right now if we really want to.