The Wilting Of Modernity
As I lay in my bed as a child, I could hear the bells of the village church toll in the distance. Soft enough not to distract during the day, yet clearly cutting through the silence of a quiet evening, signifying that I was home.
On rare occasion we would visit that church, as good casual Christians do, which had been occupying its place on that hillside since the 12th century in one form or another. It would always be terrified to enter. It was, and still is, a place of terrible beauty. I can clearly remember how I would feel watched, judged. It was intimidating walking on sacred grounds. A place where I should be on my best behavior. A place to honor the fallen, contemplate my place in the world, open my soul to harsh but fair assessment.
To this day, churches summon from within me experiences that are normally extremely hard to access. The unapologetic focus on beauty and horror, juxtaposed on scenes of stained glass, embedded in an epic architecture in which generations have sought to access the divine. A sense of belonging, as if in those sacred halls I can peer back into a world where those that came before me also walked, and a place that I hope will be there for my children when I am gone. It is a fundamental experience that allows me to reflect, and to connect with my place in the world and those around me.
There are some other places that fulfill a similar role for me, fortunate as I have been with my freedom to travel. Yet as I reflect on the church in that little village I am astonished, for why would anyone ever build anything like that? And why there? And not only there! Dotted throughout the country, in every little hovel or hole, a church of similar beauty. The enormous effort! The extraordinary expense! Is it not wondrous that our ancestors took the time to provide such a place to almost everyone, while toiling under much harder conditions than we work in today? An extraordinary display of foresight, a structure that has supported the spiritual and moral development of generations, which we are at risk of discarding in our modern day and age, to our great detriment.
What have we modern folk built to last ages? Perhaps the grandest architecture, the most profound beauty of our age, is captured in the electronic and the digital! But the beauty of silicon cathedrals is only accessible to the few privileged enough to glimpse through the facade of our everyday devices at the staggering complexity underneath. The digital on the other hand is flighty, algorithms determine what survives and what is forgotten, in a twisted tyranny of the consuming masses.
We, modern folk, are loosing touch with enduring beauty. Even worse, we now think we can dispose of it! Throwing out all that is good because we have spotted parts that are bad, without the careful work required to disentangle and reconfigure like our ancestors have done, in a naive and childlike ignorance of the sacrifice that brought us here! Centuries of toil, insight, profound beauty, suffering, confrontation, simply thrown away and discarded as if it were the next fad.
As if our children do not need to learn the lessons which we regard as a given! As if convenience and comfort are the final aspirations of a life well lived! In a time of shifting foundations and moral unrest we would do well not to lose sight of our past. We can do better. There are sparks of sanity, that I can clearly see. I hope this plea inspires some appreciation of the enduring, so we can reverse the wilting of modernity.