Find sense of sacred, not escape

On the back of this page (if you're one of our diehard "print" readers), there's a story about the new movie "Angels & Demons." I saw it the other night. It's a wild, fanciful film — a kind of "Star Wars" for Christians where the forces of good and evil battle tooth and nail.

And, more and more, that seems to be happening in the world.

Last Thursday, I spoke to a group of young men in Box Elder County. I talked about Babylon and Zion — how, in ancient days, Babylon was home to all kinds of corruption, cruelty and contamination and how Isaiah, Jeremiah and other Jewish prophets kept sounding the note, "Stay close to God, or Babylon will get you."

And that's what happened.

Now, Babylon is gone. We call it Iraq these days. But what Babylon represented — selfishness, deceit and decadence — still remains in the world. And now, just as then, prophets and other religious leaders continue to call out, "Stay close to God, or Babylon will get you."

Yet I hate to think of religious people as spiritual refugees. I prefer to see the spiritually-minded as running "to" something, not running "away" from something.

Demonizing everything that's not religious makes for a good "thriller," but it's also a bit harsh. There are some wonderful things in "the world," as we call it. I've had moments of nostalgia at concerts, moments at ballparks, moments of thrilling recreation that I wouldn't trade.

The problem isn't that "worldly" things are all bad.

The problem is they simply aren't enough.

Polls show that Americans are experimenting with faith again. As Henri Nouwen says, many are tired of just trying to stay entertained until they die.

Worldly delights are slices of store-bought bread — they can rich, filling, even nourishing.

But for those who have been fortunate enough to touch the sacred, well, those delights are slices of homemade bread — with love and goodwill baked right into them.

Back in college, I clipped out a passage by Thomas Merton and posted it to my wall. It's from "The Seven Storey Mountain." Merton's talking about worldliness:

"My father and mother were captives in that world," Merton writes, "knowing they did not belong with it or in it — not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it."

Many things in life can lift us above the mundane side of life. There were even beautiful hanging gardens in the original Babylon, after all. But those joys — good books, friendships, travel, sports, good food — only lift us "above the level of the world." They can't deliver us from it.

Only finding a sense of the sacred can do that.

And once you find that sense of the sacred, nothing else measures up.

There is a feeling of finally finding peace.

There is a feeling of coming home.

In the end, in fact, that's all missionary work is — an invitation to come home and share a slice of good homemade bread.

E-MAIL: jerjohn@desnews.com