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The renowned scholar of mystical Christian religion, Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), as does the leading religion theorist in the world now, Huston Smith, highlights the decline of religiousness in our society. Underhill wrote to the early 20th Century, Smith to the late 20th Century and to the present. Both of these persons have sounded a prophetic summons for their generations and were blessed with the media to reach a myriad with their call to return to the Creating One and the spirituality in all religion.
In The Golden Sequence, Underhill terms this loss of religiousness the transcendental sense.
The saints abound in fellowship and service, because they are abandoned to the Spirit, and see life in relation to God, instead of God in relation to life; and therefore seize with delight on every circumstance of life, as material for the expression of Charity [viz., love]. This resort to first principles, this surrender to the priority of Spirit, and the embodiment of our faith in such meek devotional practices and symbolic action as shall stimulate the transcendental sense: this, I believe, is the chief spiritual lack of the modern world.
Underhill notes the importance of spiritual religion and its Path with apt references: being abandoned to Spirit, seeing life in relation to God, seizing with delight opportunities to show Love, resorting to first principles, and stimulating the transcendental sense. And this last is the key to Christian discipleship and its only sure sign of validity as a phenomenon able to be transforming for society and persons: stimulation of the transcendental sense, or the Sense of the Sacred.
This transcendental sense saves us from reducing spirituality to a naturalistic pantheism or an otherworldly metaphysical theism. Pantheism reduces Spirit only to stuff; metaphysical theism leaves us with little means of relating Spirit to stuff.
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Underhill reminds us that much modern Christianity is mainly viewed in terms of fellowship and service. However, as she notes, these experiences refer to the experience of our faith, not the essence. Fellowship and service flow out of the devotional and sacramental life of worship and prayer, which connects us directly with the Universal Spirit.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) speaks of this servitude to pragmatism, characteristic of our losing touch with the import of being as a priority over doing. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton writes, “We have renounced the act of being and plunged ourselves into process for its own sake.” What is the result? Loss of knowing how to live, Merton claims; thus, he rightly points out that losing touch with the priority of being, we forget how to be living. Still, we go on trying to live uprooted from being, and this becomes an obsessing, a fleeing Reality: “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being.”
When religion is centered on fellowship and service, both as doing, communion—implying a transcendent society—, meant to be living in kairos, or Eternity (Eternal Life), becomes mired in and controlled by the dictates of chronos, or time. The wholeness of contemplative vision is replaced by the partial visions of linear existence. In human terms, then, a community replaces Holy Communion.
In this chronos pragmatism, sensitivity of and response to the Sacred is reduced to social or cultural goodwill and let's-enjoy-each-other togetherness: all surface and little depth, all tribal and not communion, Adam bones and flesh lacking the breath of Life. Many of us in the churches can note how many persons will attend a church fellowship dinner to talk, laugh, eat, and be entertained, yet they can not, for some reason, have time to attend prayer gathering. Obviously, they do not esteem prayer together to have the practical significance a “church fellowship” enjoys together.
If we want fellowship and service, we can belong to any number of civic groups. We can even get some fellowship at a local bar, the grocery store, or a sports event. If we want service, we can join any number of charity groups or do volunteer service.
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