The church is the means by which God deals graciously with us. It is where human beings encounter the sacred and are themselves consecrated. But this requires more than beautiful worship. True worship must be rooted in the great dogmas of the faith, which reveal both who God is and who we are in his presence.

The current interest in the church and the sacred is cause for celebration, as Christianity offers the truth about what it means to be human: a creature made in God’s image in need of redemption through Christ. As Rusty Reno highlighted in these pages, there are interesting developments taking place in England and Wales, countries marked by a deep and rapid secularization over the last century. And the U.K.’s Spectator is to host a live discussion on the recovery of the sacred among young Christians. Strange times for those of us who assumed the world was simply going to the irreligious dogs.

While the specifically Christian orientation of the trends was not predictable, the move toward seeking some kind of transcendent context is. The quest for significance characterizes the human condition. We find it hard to think of ourselves as mere flotsam and jetsam randomly cast into existence in this vast universe by some aimless process. Like Pascal, too much reflection on that can leave us feeling alone and afraid. Indeed, Nietzsche’s insight about suffering can be extrapolated to our existence as a whole: It is not existence itself but meaningless existence that we find unbearable. It is no surprise, therefore, that we are intensifying our quest for meaning at a time when the shortcomings of the post-industrial, bureaucratized, consumerist West are becoming clear.

However, this new search for the sacred does have certain shortcomings. The quest to find human significance in something that transcends the mundane immanence of our world is a noble one that speaks to our deepest needs as creatures. But the term “sacred” is too empty to really address the human condition. Taken by itself, it has an aesthetic quality, akin to earlier notions of the sublime and beautiful. It points to some portentous human experience. Thus, one can see why traditional liturgies and historical forms of worship are attractive. They offer a taste of another, very different world. They fulfill our need for beauty. And they offer us a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves and our mundane, materialist world. Who has not sensed as much when walking into a great cathedral as vespers were being sung, or when looking at the great spires and vaulted ceilings that seem to rise so effortlessly above the world of mere mortals? The prosaic rituals of modern society, even of many modern churches, cannot compete with the power of Renaissance polyphony or a Bach cantata or the Book of Common Prayer. It is thus no surprise that young, intelligent people are looking to historic forms of church life to find that meaning we all crave.

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