The Shattered Lantern

I'm reading an interesting book called The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God. This is a book about our rediscovery of the ancient practices of reflection, contemplation, and purity of heart. "Rediscovery" because there is a problem in the church today: practical atheism.

In The Shattered Lantern, Ronald Rolheiser addresses the concerning issue of atheism and disbelief within the church. To get at this, he uses Nietzsche's parable of the madman as a starting point. A "madman" lights a lantern and in bright daylight rushes into a crowded marketplace shouting: "I seek God! I seek God!" But the people in the marketplace ridicule him, yelling and laughing at him. So the madman turns on them and shouts, "God is dead, I tell you, we have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives." Then he goes silent, smashes his lantern on the ground and says, "I have come too early. This deed is still too distant for people to see, and yet they have done this to themselves. They have killed God."

Practical atheism is not something that primarily exists outside the church. It is very much a phenomenon within the circle of "believers." In The Shattered Lantern, Rolheiser argues that we have killed God in that he is often absent from the ordinary consciousness and lives of believers, not alive enough alive or important enough. Why is this? Because there is something wrong with us. There is a fault in us, namely blindness.

Instead of experiencing God on a deep, intimate level, we often relate to God as a distant, detached creator. God is related to "as a religion, a church, a moral philosophy, a guide for private virtue, an imperative for justice, or a nostalgia for propriety...God, then, is more of a moral and intellectual principle than a person, and our commitment to this principle runs the gamut from fiery passion, by which people are willing to die for a cause, to a vague nostalgia, in which God and religion are given the same kind of status as the royal family in England" (pgs. 18-19).

Many Christians in Western culture today have an atrophied contemplative faculty, a muddied self-awareness. We are numb and blind to God's ever-presence. God is present to us, but we are not present to God. "The struggle to experience God is not so much one of God's presence or absence as it is one of the presence or absence of God in our awareness. God is always present, but we are not always present to God" (pg. 22).

Purity of heart and mind is the focal point of Christian spirituality. But our hearts and minds are often muddied by the cares of the world. Instead of being attentive to God in ordinary life, we are preoccupied with that which is carnal. For many of us, God is not compelling in our day-to-day experiences. We are restless, narcissistic, focused on self and our so-called pressing consumer "needs."

In this first decade of the 21st century, we are at the end of a long historical process that killed God (both knowingly and unknowingly). Our present crisis of a living and vibrant faith has deep roots that reach back hundreds of years into the middle ages. A seed was planted that has now come to full bloom...