Psychology & The Cross

 A big theme of the first two seasons of Secular Christ was that every age is an age of the Church. Even if the Church is scarcely recognizable, the Church being the community of those who do not take offense at the Christ, the community of those who've said yes to the offer of grace, and we never know who they are, they don't coincide with visible Church, and particularly now in the era in which The institutions of Christianity have all withered and fallen. We are particularly without a sense of who is Church.

And so we need guidance in the darkness. We need some kind of rules of life. How to proceed without the support of institutional Christianity., assuming that the secular age is also an age of the church, because Christianity, self secularizes is the self secularizing religion has produced secularism.

We still need guidance in the darkness. And where are we to look for this guidance? There's only one place to look, and that is to the past, to the tradition for seeds of secular Christianity. We need to look into the Christian tradition, the immense tradition of theology and mysticism and the witness of saints and of poets and of thinkers for words of life. These are words who will come from people who would not have identified with our age, who would not have identified with secular Christianity. People who lived in a very different time than ours, but who were channeling a truth that was greater than themselves and their own times and therefore have a word for us.

Even though. They would never have predicted us. And so in season three, I'm thinking of a time traveling journey into the history of secular Christianity. And our first stop will be Rome in the first century, in the second or third generation after the death and resurrection of Christ. And then from there, we'll go to Alexandria a hundred years later.

The cultural Mecca of the Roman Empire, where we'll visit the catechetical school, the first theologate, the first school that trained people in Christian theology. Then we'll jump forward a thousand years into Belgium, the lowlands, where we'll learn from the Beguines about A non hierarchical order, an order in which there is no up and down, no higher and lower, which has been inaugurated by the gospel.

And we'll finish in the 14th century, in Germany, where Meister Eckart, the great Dominican preacher and mystic, will gather together many of these themes and give us a word to go forward.