Contemporary society's threat to Sacramentality

Abstract

A significant threat to sacramentality, to the sense of the sacred [sacrare, "to make holy"], that contemporary society poses to both religious thought and expression is its denial or mitigation of the numinous quality of human experience. The sense that one moves in a constant encounter - a dance, really - with that which is not entirely known and which cannot fully be expressed is a sense increasingly dulled. The sense of the numinos, the holy, the mysterious inenarrability of the divine, has been seriously compromised by a contemporary approach to religious experience that is forensic [in that it cuts open a body to see how it works]; reductionist [in that if it cannot be easily explained in materialistic terms, then it is dismissed]; and mechanistic [in that actions are understood in a manner divorced from their meaning].