Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

Yesterday I spoke of my destiny leading me to drink deeply from two very different **patterns** of spiritual culture. In more recent years, I have explored the ‘pattern’ offered by Catholicism. But before that, I experienced intensively a new pattern of spiritual culture now emerging throughout countless ‘holistic venues’ in the West.

How many examples of this New Age cultural pattern have I experienced since 1980? I both visited and lived at the Findhorn community in Scotland over many years. I participated in countless holistic seminars and workshops, wherein people of a New Age persuasion assembled for a weekend, or even a week or two.

And in that short space of time, ‘New Age Culture’ was created in a miniature sphere - wherein the participants could leave behind the mainstream world to live and breath the New Age air.

I even co-founded a holistic educational charity in Cambridge, which offered such seminars regularly and was actively dedicated to expressing what we all believed was ‘the new spiritual culture’.

Thus, at this charity we had a room called a Sanctuary. The Sanctuary was intended as a place of meditation, and was consciously devoid of imagery. Chairs were arranged in circles and a sign hung on the door, with words from my own pen:

‘This sanctuary is dedicated to the idea that there are no words or forms that can express the ultimately REAL without also limiting it, and that no religion or belief may be said to be the TRUTH but only a refraction among many such refractions that serve to guide the way.

This room is therefore dedicated to silence and simplicity that every seeker may feel welcomed there to find within the SACRED REALITY for which no words suffice but from which healing, inspiration and renewal FLOW’.

I relate all of this, because I want to provide a clearer picture of what I mean by ‘an emerging New Age model of Sacred Culture’.

Now that my path is decisively Catholic, I have been asked if I still stand by the words I wrote for that sign. The answer is both yes and no.

Yes, inasmuch as I believe that spiritual reality does indeed transcend the forms human beings use to express it.

No, inasmuch as the words on this door have an agenda I no longer aspire to. That agenda is one of relativising or even dismissing the value of these forms.

For it does not follow - ipso facto – that because the forms necessarily limit the ‘ultimately real’, they are as dispensable as I once believed.

In fact, although the words I wrote suggest the forms are limiting, I now ask whether it is a far greater privation to have no forms at all.

That is to say, whether these limited forms may not serve to open the heart and mind to the limitlessness far, far more than could ever be the case by simply dispensing with them.

Yes, this sign that once hung upon a door to a New Age Sanctuary in Cambridge expresses the New Age Agenda: Drop the Forms which Limit Us and Enter Herein …

Without ever asking whether these limited forms might yet offer far, far more than we New Agers ever imagined.

These days I meditate on the ‘limited forms’ of the Catholic religion. And how my heart and mind have been opened by them, in ways incomprehensible to my New Age experience.

Recently I have been speaking of the universal tragedy of the Fall. This is indeed perceived through a limited form. But how much richer my own life is for having perceived it.

And how much more open, how much more **human** my HEART has become by standing before what the Judaeo-Christian teaches of the Fall …

And how impoverished my previous life appears by comparison. And yes - less **human**. Herein lies more of my pained concern regarding the New Age project for Stripping the Tradition …

So much for these morsels of New Age autobiography. Tomorrow I hope to elucidate the themes of these confessions, by drawing more on my Catholic experience.