The Path of Disenchantment

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1. We are wired for wonder and enchantment.
2. Because our culture values consumption over wonder, and materialism over mystery, we are a disenchanted people.
3. Our “modern” journey over the last 300 to 500 years has led us to a place where we are more aware of our human achievements (many of them dubious) than we are of our marvellously enchanted universe.
4. When we dissociate science and engineering from spirit, morality, and ethics, the important questions don’t get asked.
5. The great myths of our biblical tradition, such as the stories of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, and the Golden Calf, are remarkable for their capacity to speak to the deep dilemmas of our human condition.
6. Pre-modern humans imagined a cosmos filled with meaning and purpose, in which the sacred permeated everything. Modern humans  have stripped the cosmos of intrinsic meaning, and have declared that purposeful intelligence belongs exclusively to humans.
7. People come to church to validate their experiences of an enchanted or sacred dimension in life. Telling them that the religious life is about being “good,” or worse, about being “better,” doesn’t speak to their spiritual intuition or to their spiritual yearning.
8. According to postmodernism, two things are important in our making of meaning: the beliefs and stories we tell about the nature of reality, and the context in which we are immersed.
9. The natural world is a sacred text, infused with divine radiance. God is in everything and everything is within the one we call God.
10. The price of our dissociation from the natural world is to be seen all around us in such things as the destruction of natural habitat, the growing numbers of species at risk, the acceleration in the warming of planet Earth, and the growing scarcity of fresh water.

How do we respond to such a list? What follows are two kinds of response, one more introspective and the other active. You might find them helpfully complementary.