<< The lost spirit

Nowadays, it is not unusual for us in western societies to live in secular communities. We praise this as an achievement and defend its superiority over any other alternatives.

I fundamentally see the point and understand the importance of separating any particular beliefs from political structures; after all, we have never been so successful at mixing government and religion. 

That being said, our societies have at same time become increasingly colder and to a degree, emptier. A sort of nihilism that permeates everything and takes meaning away from anything we attempt because nothing really matters.

If we study the great constructions of the past, starting with the great pyramids and temples, through castles and cathedrals we can clearly see that all of them have something in common: these types of buildings transcend and speak to about something bigger and more permanent than our life. There  are ideas that have physically taken shape. 

Structures like this represent something, praise something. As a consequence of the belief in a higher being we overlook not only costs but also push aesthetics and technology. In contrast, everything that we do today seems dull, insignificant and unlikely to last more than a couple hundred years.

Secularism and the plurality it brings has stripped our cultures of the visions that far exceed our own and reduced our buildings and creations to the temporary. While the architects of St. Peter constructed the glorious eternal city, ours nowadays think of improving the margin of the company for the coming quarter.

We lack a bigger frame under which we can unify, and to do so we must accept the existence of something greater than us. We have elevated ourselves to the rank of divinity in an act of arrogance and taken away the creative capacity of our hands in doing so; our days spent in acts of insignificance, and completely disconnected from the great spirits of the past. 

No man (or women) has ever been able to create anything of value, taking the temporal as a reference. Perhaps many of the problems we face today and which we cannot agree upon require not more secularization, but the opposite. A renewed belief sparking the ingenuity of human spirit and the creative capacity of our species. 

We’ve lost the humbleness of looking to infinity and seeing how small we really are; and until we realize and accept that which we have lost: we will hardly be able to come back.

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