Dear Friends, Known and Unknown,

At the heart of these confessions, is my attempt to voice my ever-growing sense, that the Stripping of Tradition is costing our culture far, far more than is commonly appreciated.

But before continuing to ponder the consequences of the New Age Dismantling of Tradition, I am going to ‘backtrack’ in time. It is not easy to articulate my concerns and I have decided that a little more personal background to these confessions may help to elucidate them.

Thus, once upon a time, I ran a small New Age project in Cambridge, England - which published a little magazine called ‘Sacred Culture’.

That simple phrase is filled with meaning for me – and these confessions are written, looking back on more than twenty five years of my search for a ‘Sacred Culture’.

That is to say, my quest for a Culture in which the Sacred and the Truly Human would be honoured – in contradistinction to so much of the mainstream secular and increasingly brutal capitalist culture.

And in these decades of searching for ‘Sacred Culture’, I have experienced two major PATTERNS for forming such a culture. I will call these two models:The New Age pattern and the Catholic Christian pattern.

There is the New Age pattern, wherein the Christian Tradition of the West is dismantled, to be replaced - in the best instances - by a rich psychological awareness and often-rich human to human contact.

It is filled with certain **contemporary** insights into the human condition – but as I have at least suggested, so often at the cost of psychologising and relativising tremendous insights from the **past**.

Again Matthew Fox, to take a single example, seems to me to dismissive of so, so many of the insights and visions of the tradition. Not least of all, those of that author, who began his Gospel saying “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became Flesh and dwelt amongst us” ...

Then there is the Catholic pattern in which so, so much tradition of the West, including not only the Gospel, but also the preceding Greek and Judaic traditions is honoured. And not only sola scriptura - the Bible alone - but also two thousand years of insight into the Christian Mystery ...

These confessions are formed then, from my intimate experiences of very **different** spiritual milieus. (I have also experienced a rather different, but nonetheless Christian Anthroposophical ‘pattern for a Sacred Culture’ – but I leave this aside for the moment.)

My confessions are formed also from my experience of the ultimate inadequacy of the New Age vision, and also of the utterly unexpected riches I discovered within the Church. Profound riches I had not the slightest inkling of in the New Age world. Riches which even in my darkest times, bring me a joy, consolation and peculiar sense of wholeness and wholesomeness I never experienced in my New Age past.

Yes especially in the Sacraments, I feel this rich and peculiar sense of cleansing wholesomeness. Deep, deep, deep.

And all of these are Christian riches, which I now think the New Age ignores or strips to its peril. And I confess, I think to the peril of the world.

For it seems to me that the unexpected riches cast aside by both secularism and New Age-ism, may actually be critical to the future of humanity. By this, I mean not necessarily the survival of the species, homo sapiens – but certainly to the survival of HUMAN culture.

To me it seems inescapable. The last twenty five years or so since I first entered the New Age world, have seen the rise and rise of the New Age cafeteria. And the last twenty five years have seen an ongoing brutalisation of human culture.

Yes, these confessions are formed by very different experiences of very different patterns for a ‘Sacred Culture’. And before I proceed much further with my thoughts about the New Age Stripping of Tradition, I will delve a little further into my autobiography to try to convey better what I experience and see in these two patterns ...