Awakenings as Holy Geography

Wonderful Artwork, courtesy of Brian Andreas, Storypeople.

“Awakenings are movements of cultural revitalization that eventuate in basic reconstructions of our institution and redefinitions of our social order. . . .Revivals and awakenings occur in all cultures. They are essentially folk movements, the means by which a people or a nation reshapes its identity, transforms its patterns of thought and action, and sustains a healthy relationship with environmental and social change. Awakenings begin when old systems break down, in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions and the authority of our leaders in church and state. A critical disjunction in how we perceive ourselves, God, and the world arise from the stress. The end of the old opens the way for the new.”
Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion, The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, working from the writing of William McLoughlin, author of Revivals, Awakenings and Reform.

​An awakening is holy geography. Awakenings imply new awareness, inner transformation, a change in heart and mind, and a reordering of priorities, commitments and behaviours. . . .Awakenings take work, as human beings respond to the promptings of God’s Spirit in the world. . .Some things will cease to work, no longer make sense, and fail to give comfort or provide guidance. Institutions struggle to maintain only themselves, concentrating on their own survival in this world. Political parties wither. Religions lose their ability to inspire. But that only means we have work to do - here and now - to find new paths of meaning, new ways to connect with God and neighbour, to form new communities, to organize ways of making the world a better place. These are hard time, but not end times.”
Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion, The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

"Historians have traditionally seen this event (Council of Nicaea, which was convened by the Emperor Constantine himself in 325 A.D.) as the final triumph of the Church and the beginning of its long dominance of European history. It established dogmatic Christianity in a long partnership with the world of political power that became known as Christendom, and only in our day is it in its final stages of dissolution. So glorious and powerful was the institution of Christendom that it was almost impossible to see through it to the man who stood behind it, the peasant from Galilee who had refused to cringe before the very powers that crucified him and was later, officially, to deify him. The fascinating thing about our day is that, as the political and theological structures of Christendom crash down before our eyes, we can see once again, through the rubble and dust of the centuries, a clearer picture of the prophet of Nazareth.”
Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What Is Left of Christianity? ,172, as quoted in Douglas John Hall's 2006 Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church and Culture.