Light On Dark Water

Here’s one of those rare sentences that, in one instant, makes sense of a great many things:

Secularism, I submit, is above all a negation of worship.

—Alexander Schmemann

How much of what is wrong with the modern world is accounted for by this sentence? Almost everything, I’d say.

And a bit more:

It is the negation of man as a worshiping being…the one for whom worship is the essential act which both ‘posits’ his humanity and fulfills it.

In particular, this aspect of secularism accounts, in great measure, for the sort of individual and collective depression that afflicts the secularized world. It is in our nature to worship; not to worship is to deny that nature and to fall into dejection and/or anger.

I found this passage in the May issue of Touchstone, by the way, in an article by Lance Nixon called “Images of Redemption.”

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