Harmony and understanding

Sympathy and trust abounding

No more falsehoods or derisions

Golden living dreams of visions

Mystic crystal revelation

And the mind’s true liberation.

“Let the Sun Shine In” The Fifth Dimension, 1967

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Several years ago, Alice and I visited the family of a former classmate in Zaragoza, Spain. The beautiful city with its twin spired cathedral and shrine to the Virgin, has long been considered to be one of the most “Catholic” cities in that country. While there, we were shown a video of one of his children, now grown. Many years earlier we had attended Mass with him and his very devout family. Yet like so many other young countrymen, he had abandoned the practice of his faith, and turned to eastern mysticism. He was now directing a Yoga Center in a nearby town, where, playing a one-stringed instrument and dressed in white clothing and turban, he met regularly with other young Spaniards. All were in search of truth and enlightenment that they did not find in the Catholic Church. It was a first introduction to the spirituality of the “New Age.”

Beginning in the 1960s, many people in Europe and America were swept up in a variety of spiritual experiences including Eastern meditation techniques, Reiki, crystals, astrology, Feng Shui, psychedelic drugs, and channeling. A common element was a holistic view of the universe and belief a higher, transcendent reality. For many, this celebration of a new astrological phase human history was a sentiment more than a religion, a feeling that a new cosmic era, an Age of Aquarius, was beginning. The unbridled optimism did not last. Battered by social unrest, terrorism, and Covid, the notion of transformative change faded and in recent years even the name “New Age” fell out of use. But the underlying attitudes persist.

The Church’s response came slowly. In 2003, a Vatican study group condemned these approaches as “deceptive.”  There were complaints about the absence of ethical or social engagement in a spirituality where freedom to make one’s own “kind of music” was primary.  But no real change was apparent in Catholic thinking until the advent of Pope Francis in 2013.

Francis was a different kind of pope. As a young Jesuit, he had taught literature and art to high school students and was keenly interested in pastoral outreach. Beginning in the  first year of his papacy, Francis authored a series of “Apostolic Exhortations” on topics ranging from evangelization, to marriage, the family, the environment, and social friendship. They were addressed to the spiritual needs of ordinary persons, Catholic as well as non-Catholic, and paid particular attention to the young.  Avoiding technical, theological language, they cast Christian belief in a fresh light.

A theme running through these documents is the importance of humble and sincere human encounter. “Young people,” Pope Francis writes, “often fail to find responses to their concerns, needs, problems and hurts…We find it hard to listen patiently to them… and to speak to them in a language they can understand.” He emphasizes that room should be made for “all those who have other visions of life, who belong to other religions or who distance themselves from religion altogether.”  Such listening, he explains, requires a willingness to engage in “dialogue, born from an attitude of respect for the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It assumes that there is room in the heart for the person’s point of view, opinion, and proposals.”

There is a poetic almost mystical, streak that Francis brought to what he describes uas our “common table.”  Speaking to young Catholics, he wrote: “The Lord is calling us to enkindle stars in the night of other young people. He asks you to look to the true stars, all those varied signs he gives us to guide our way, and to imitate the farmer who watches the stars before going out to plough his field. God lights up stars to help us keep walking: “The stars shine in their watches and are glad; he calls them, and they say: ‘Here we are!’” (Bar 3:34-35). Inevitably we are led to Christ, “our great light of hope and our guide in the night, …the “bright morning star” (Rev 22:16) who animates all we do.”

There is also a fierce conviction that Christian spirituality is not an end unto itself.  “The world needs Christians, Francis explained, who “believe so deeply in [Jesus] that we become the image of Christ for the world. Our times need “mystics”: people who reject every form of power, who aspire to charity and fraternity. Men and women who live, also accepting a portion of suffering, because they take on themselves the struggles of others. Without these men and women, the world would not have hope.”

In Francis’ view, the truest spirituality is not a flight from the world, but a movement towards the world. It is an act of love toward others in their everyday, concrete reality.  “If the music of the Gospel,” he notes, “ceases to resonate in our very being, we will lose the joy born of compassion, the tender love born of trust, the capacity for reconciliation that has its source in our knowledge that we have been forgiven and sent forth. If the music of the Gospel ceases to sound in our homes our public squares, our workplaces, our political and financial life, then we will no longer hear the strains that challenge us to defend the dignity of every man and woman. Others drink from other sources. For us the wellspring of human dignity and fraternity is in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

In 2018, an opinion poll by the Pew Research Center concluded that at least one form of New Age belief, ranging from belief in reincarnation, astrology, psychics, to the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains, was espoused by 60% of adult Americans. In Europe, a similar phenomenon exists in which most individuals regard themselves as cultural but “non-practicing Christians.”

New Age spirituality is often characterized by a mixing of oriental teachings such as karma and reincarnation with elements of Christianity and agnosticism and remains a live and much-discussed topic. In some ways this situation resembles the religious eclecticism that prevailed in Mediterranean cultures when Paul and the apostles preached the Christian message. Many today find themselves in a similar place of deep spiritual hungers pervaded by shadows of uncertainty. The Gospel message so ably articulated by Pope Francis brings sustenance and light to this struggling world and does so with “a new kind of music a new kind of song.”