I fully agree with Dickow's opening premise: There are millions of so-called Christians who believe they don't need the Church. God is everywhere, even at the beach. Who needs clergy, buildings, liturgy? In the college-educated, knee-jerk-liberal suburbs north of Boston, I am surrounded by people who think like this. Many of them buy this basic premise of today's New Age, along with another fundamental tenet: "I create my own reality."
But to me, who was a young adult during the tsunami of so-called "spiritual awakening" that characterized the late 1960s, when the parents and grandparents of today's New Agers were channeling Eastern thought into the western mainstream, what passes for "New Age" today looks like just another publishing fad, a third-degree undertow of the tsunami, or what the Sufis (popular in the late 1960s) called the soup of the soup of the soup. Personally, I'm going to let it all wash out to sea. The Church will still be standing.
How do millions of Christians get duped into believing the ramblings of New Age messengers like the best-selling Neale Donald Walsch? The same way they get duped into believing the premise of films like "2012" and listening to artistes like Britney Spears. It's the media, stupid. Ten years from today, guaranteed, other gurus, blockbusters, and chanteuses will be running up even bigger numbers. The Church will still be standing.
Here's my perspective. You have to go back to the First World War and the years following. Ha, ha, sorry—I'm not that old, but I've done my reading. It was after the first war that T. S. Eliot wrote "The Waste Land," a description of the spiritual landscape in the 1920s, and Robert Graves wrote "Goodbye to All That," a sad adieu to all the old certainties. The war's terrible slaughter had left the West limp with disillusionment, and the old ways, all of them, had been shown to be moribund—apparently. Modernism was the vogue, and other isms like communism, socialism, and existentialism were in the ascendant. Catholicism? Outdated, ossified, impotent, unnecessary.
Across this landscape came mesmerizing figures from the East to fill the spiritual void that undeniably existed. Zen master D. T. Suzuki and Jiddu Krishnamurti, a sage identified by the Theosophical Society and schooled by Annie Besant, were two of the better known. Slightly less known but, for my money, far more compelling was George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (left). I spent the years of my 20s and 30s reading the Gurdjieff canon, and although this is not the place to expound on it, I will vouch for its meaning to me—even today. But here's my main point: Virtually every "New Age" principle being foisted on the gullible today amounts to a watered-down rip-off of a very interesting Gurdjieffian idea.One example cited by Dickow, "I create my reality," is a third-degree simplification of the Gurdjieff teaching that one's "level of being" attracts one's life. The term "I" assumes one level of being; Gurdjieff made no such assumption. In his own allegorical way, he held with the dogma of original sin and the brokenness of our humanity.
Another example not cited by Dickow is the symbol Gurdjieff arguably originated, the Enneagram (left). At Amazon.com right now, you can purchase 314 books with "Enneagram" in the title. Virtually all of these are third- or fourth-generation imitators of what, in the original, is an extraordinarily robust visual summary of the Gurdjieff teaching.It was in the late 1960s that the teachings begotten by Gurdjieff, Suzuki, Krishnamurti, et al., flowered in the hothouse of countercultural rebellion against certainties political as well as spiritual. These teachings went mainstream; when "my generation" wasn't sucking on hookahs and listening to "White Rabbit," or striking against the war in Vietnam, we were all agog over the spiritual news from the East.
We got over it. The joke of my generation is that we turned the world upside-down, then most of us went straight. The joke of the next generation, today's "New Agers," is that they thought they discovered what we had already sampled and many of us had abandoned, at least those of us who went to work for Goldman Sachs and had 1.7 children.
Something else happened in the next generation, however, which runs completely counter to the New Age: an evangelical revival of traditional Christianity in the most secular country on earth, the United States. With the remarkable force transmitted by the papacy of John Paul II, backed up by the genial teaching of Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has been revitalized—potentially rediscovering the meaning of Vatican II and magnetizing such unlikely converts as . . . well, me.
So I'm not going to worry too much about the latest pablum being served up by New Agers, no matter how many books they sell. Ages will continue to come and go, but my money says, the Church will still be standing.
