I must confess that of all I have said, I thought the use of the terms “bow down” and “submit” would be the least questionable.
I believe man must always bow down or submit to something beyond or within him that he can freely acknowledge as a guiding principle, be that an idea of creativity, an ethical ideal, or a divine creator.
With the dawn of the Renaissance comes an increasingly more articulated thrust to apotheosize the individual. In Nietzsche that thrust flowers with the declaration that “God is dead”. Man could no longer tolerate living under someone or something. Man “stands out” (ex-ists) in the universe, man does not humble himself to the universe or to some big bang of the divine fiat “Let there be…”. Existentialism, or more precisely, atheistic existentialism was born. Man had to be the maker of his own values, his own rules. Man had to be master of his own destiny even in the face of fate and fatality. There is much truth here, but it comes from a very wrong place in man, from anger and dissolution fostered by the failure of spiritual direction and support. A medieval god could not speak to modern man, and so, modern man (Nietzsche, Sartre, and the cohorts of their co-anti-religionists) obliterated from the world the incoherent noise of an antique relic. But where an attitude comes from is as important to consider as the attitude.
All values, rules, laws, principles, visions come from man. They always have. One may claim they arise from the heart of man inspired by God or dictated to by God, but the fundament remains: they come from man. We have no stone tablets, no monoliths, no rainbow on which are written up for all times and places the what and how man must do. Even were that the case, man would need to accent to them, to enfold them within, to “write them on his heart” were they to have any practical value or hold. Man–whether inspired by a god or enlightened by his own experience and reflection– concocts his visions and understandings of himself and his world, and establishes codes of practical behaviour for maneuvering the same. Those codes have traditionally been, to one degree or another, en-culturized, established into a schema of cult and culture, a system of societal cohesion. The cult is always the subliminal expression of the culture. Social rules, expectations, and aspirations are given a coded existence, ritualized, and iconicized in some form, be it the tribal totem, the revered ancestors, or some deities of lesser or greater extension and/or power. But cults tend to fossilize in the course of institutionalization, and thereby begin to slowly and incessantly drag behind the evolution of the society. The cult becomes the antique, the relic of times past, a curiosity, but no longer the heart and hearth of social cohesion.
The churches of the renaissance, of the modern age, could not escape this cultic sclerosis. They could not find the code, the words, the vision to transmit gospel in a comprehensible language to a new world. And so the world ignored them, castigated them and their emblems for their irrelevance, and went on to establish a new cult, the cult of man.
If you read the great atheistic existentialists, you will find they are not without some idea of a divine, an all inspiring or defining principle. They are culturally conditioned and delimited from ever being free to refer to such as something divine or a mask of the divine. They are too abandoned by the cult of the past to ever want a cult of any type. But we are not capable of being without a cult any more than without a culture. Today we worship at the altar of financial success and gain, and around that cult our culture teeters. We walk alone, we bow down before our Blackberries and iPods, we allow ourselves to wallow in a ceaseless now. We preen ourselves, we encastle ourselves, we absorb ourselves. And all the while, the immensity above and beyond and within is ignored, and the most precious visions and vistas we can and could rise to are lost to a seemingly endless tinkering with things and fidgeting with ourselves.
To bow down and submit before the fearsome and wondrous power of being is merely to stop and acknowledge that I have roots, I have profundity, I have some meaning beyond this moment. It is to stop the constant flow of chatter and listen to the creativity of silence, to feel the rapture of stillness and her wings, to be re-created in the sheer and awesome wonder that I am, that we are. Somewhere in time a man looked out in wonder and asked who are you, and Wonder spoke back “I am”.
I have enunciated before the simple psychological reality: we are that which we worship. Bow we down and submit to our balance sheets, our latest and most minimalized machine of communication, our sculpted flesh, our aggrandized homes or to something more?
God is not dead. We have, many of us, simply lost his address, and yet yearn, in some secret speck of us, to find his threshold whereon to kneel and be embraced.