Whatever it is, it is sooner or later unavoidable in our lives.[1]
Humans live and move and have their being in two realms, the immediate world created by the senses, and the vastly larger world mediated by meaning.[2] Rites and rituals connect the two and inform the latter. From this intersection ritually expressed arises the sense of the sacred, at least primordially. “The sacred, in its simplest sense, is the restraining force on human appetite that gives birth to desire, mediated by the world of signs.”[3]
There is however more to the sacred than “Thou shalt not.”. Losing any sense of it is part of the modern dilemma. As seen by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, many people today have a “buffered self”, as opposed to people of previous ages who had “porous selves.” By this he means a perspective that grows out of a denial that anything that cannot be empirically proven has any claim upon us: we are “buffered.”
Taylor calls the present moment “the immanent frame”:
It is the sense of an absence; it is the sense that all order, all meaning, come from us. We encounter no echo outside. In the world read this way, as so many of our contemporaries live it, the natural/supernatural distinction is no intellectual abstraction. A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world as entirely immanent. In some…
